Slaughter and May has signed on to act in partnership with young tech companies by joining a campaign aimed at supporting 50 of the most promising late-stage UK companies in the sector. 

As part of Tech Nation’s Future Fifty Campaign, Slaughters lawyers will provide insights and professional experience to the initiative’s latest cohort through workshops, one-on-one mentoring, networking opportunities and technical training. 

The firm said its involvement with the Tech Nation programme will provide a platform to offer Slaughters’ institutional M&A and IPO insights to fast-growing Future Fifty companies as they look to the next stages of their development strategies. 

Slaughters emerging tech partner Ben Kingsley said: “We always enjoy working with pioneers and helping to remove the legal and regulatory obstacles in their paths – so we’re all looking forward to doing more of this with this fantastic Future Fifty cohort.”

Founded in 2010, Tech Nation aims to support scaling tech companies in order to boost the tech sector’s place in the UK economy. Previous programme partners have included Google, Crowdcube, KPMG and Stanford University. 

The free-to-join programme is open to UK-based companies that have passed at least a Series B funding stage or achieved annual revenues over £5m as well as 50% year-on-year-growth. 

One of the companies selected to partake in the Future Fifty campaign this year is Slaughters client PrimaryBid, a tech platform that allows everyday investors fair access to public companies raising capital. The company, co-founded by Kieran D’Silva, graduated from Tech Nation’s 2019 programme prior to its selection for this year’s Future Fifty cohort. 

D’Silva commented: “Having worked closely with Slaughter and May on landmark transactions such as the community offer for Deliveroo and our own Series B fundraise last year I am delighted that they are involved in this prestigious programme."

Eleanor Weaver, chief executive officer at Luminance, one of the firm’s long-time legaltech collaborators, added: “Slaughter and May recognised the potential of Luminance to transform document review since its founding in 2015 and has continued to provide valuable support to the business. It is encouraging to see that other thriving UK scale-ups will now benefit from the firm’s advice."

A number of other big law firms have been ramping up their involvement in the burgeoning UK tech sector amid high demand caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. CMS became the second law firm to participate in the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s regulatory sandbox aimed at driving innovation in the fintech sector in June, while Allen & Overy successfully kickstarted the fifth iteration of its tech incubator programme, Fuse, back in May. 

Earlier this week, Slaughters made waves when it appointed its first-ever managing partner, Deborah Finkler, as part of a wider leadership shake up aimed at modernising the firm’s governance structure.