Stuart Hopper

Stuart is a Visiting Lecturer at the Oxford Law Faculty. He has 30 years’ experience as both a practising lawyer and in senior management positions in global and offshore law firms. He now works as a legal business services consultant and change expert advising law firms and legal departments on service and efficiency improvement, knowledge management, innovation (including digitisation and uses of AI) and process enhancement. Previous roles in private practice have included Director of Practice Development, Knowledge & Innovation at Dentons and Director of Knowledge for the Global M&A Practice at Baker McKenzie.

Born in Ethiopia and with dual British/Nigerian heritage, Stuart is an active champion of diversity, equality and inclusion, and is currently on the board of an Africa-wide STEM educational charity for girls. He is a LawTech UK mentor, a member of the Lawtech Sounding Board at the City of London, and set up (and chairs) the Industry Mentor Group for Oxford University’s postgraduate Law & Computer Science Programme.

He is a contributing author to Legal Due Diligence in International M&A Transactions - A Practitioner's Guide (Kästle/Svernlöv eds, 2022), quoted in Professional Services Leadership Handbook: How to lead a professional services firm in a new age of competitive disruption (Beddow, Kent, Furner & Clark 2017) and was the editor of Baker McKenzie’s International Joint Ventures Handbook (1st ed. Oct 2015) and Global M&A Handbook (1st ed. Mar 2015).

A graduate of the Cranfield NED Programme, Stuart has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Law from Oxford University, an MBA from Henley Business School (with a dissertation on behavioural change in law firms), and a Masters’ degree (Distinction) in African Studies from SOAS, University of London (with a dissertation on Economic Anthropology). He is admitted as a solicitor (non-practising) of the Supreme Court of England and Wales and the British Virgin Islands.