I’m Dhruve. I fix the legal bits so you can keep moving.

I started my career the conventional way. I qualified as a solicitor in 2007 and went into private practice. Like most newly qualified lawyers, I’d spent years learning how to identify legal issues, analyse them and give technically correct advice. What I hadn’t really been taught was what happens after you give that advice.

Moving in-house relatively early in my career changed that.

Suddenly, I wasn’t advising a client and moving on to the next matter. I was sitting alongside the people who actually had to make the decision. Sales wanted to close the deal. Product wanted to launch. Finance had a number to hit. And somewhere amongst all of that, legal needed to help the business work out what it could actually do.

I started to realise that being technically right was only part of the job.

You could write a beautifully reasoned explanation of why something was risky and still be completely unhelpful.

The better question was: what are we actually trying to achieve?

Once you understand that, you can distinguish the risks that genuinely matter from the ones that are theoretically possible, find another route when the obvious one doesn’t work, and give people something they can actually make a decision with.

That move probably shaped the way I’ve practised law ever since.

Technology companies are an interesting place to be a lawyer.

The product changes. The regulation changes. The commercial model changes. And occasionally all three change while you’re still reviewing the contract.

Over the years I’ve worked alongside sales teams trying to close major deals, engineers building products lawyers don’t always immediately understand, privacy teams navigating new regulation, and senior management trying to make decisions without having every fact they’d ideally like.

That environment taught me something I’ve carried with me ever since: legal advice has to survive contact with the business.

“No” is sometimes the right answer. But it’s rarely the complete answer.

If something can’t be done in the way originally proposed, can it be structured differently? If a contractual position isn’t perfect, what’s the actual exposure? If everyone is arguing over a clause, does that clause genuinely matter?

Some of the most valuable conversations I’ve had as a lawyer haven’t involved quoting a piece of legislation or negotiating another half-page of contractual wording. They’ve involved sitting with someone and saying: this is the risk, this is how likely I think it is, and this is what I’d do.

Working in tech taught me to be comfortable doing that.

And eventually it made me wonder whether there was a way of offering that kind of support to more than one business.

For most of my career, I’d been the in-house lawyer.

I liked being close to the business. Knowing the people, understanding the product, remembering why a slightly strange provision ended up in a contract six months earlier. All the context you accumulate by actually being part of the team.

But I also kept seeing the same problem.

There are plenty of growing businesses that need experienced legal support but don’t necessarily need another senior lawyer sitting there five days a week.

Their alternative is often to use a law firm whenever something comes up. That can give them excellent legal advice, but it isn’t quite the same thing as having someone who knows the business and is invested in getting things done.

I thought there should be something between the two.

So I created Eliga.

The idea was fairly simple: take what I liked about being in-house and make it available fractionally.

Work inside the business rather than at arm’s length from it. Get to know the commercial team. Understand the technology. Learn where the bodies are buried in the contracts. And be there often enough that people don’t have to explain the company from scratch every time they need legal help.

I didn’t set out at the beginning of my career with a grand plan to build a legal consultancy.

Looking backwards, though, it makes a surprising amount of sense.