About

ITLawCo was designed from the buyer side of outside counsel.

Nathan-Ross Adams founded the firm after years as a General Counsel, on the receiving end of legal advice that was technically correct but operationally incomplete, and of engagements that ended at the memo when the real work was only beginning. The premise was simple. Sophisticated in-house teams don’t need another adviser standing at a distance. They need specialists who can work alongside them and help get difficult work done.

The team has grown around that idea.

How we think about the work

Complex technology, data and AI decisions rarely sit inside one discipline. Ours doesn’t either.

We work in three integrated modes. Legal judgment answers what is required, permitted, prohibited or defensible. Operational and systems analysis tests whether the legal answer survives contact with the organisation: the systems it has to run in, the controls it has to become, the processes that carry it. Disciplined delivery makes sure engagements move, and that what we produce is usable by the people who have to use it.

The pattern across engagements is consistent. Clients bring us a problem framed as legal. Discovery usually shows the question is structural, not tactical. We design a decision architecture the organisation can use, not a document to file.

Most of what clients pay for, when they hire us, is the reduction of what we call translation burden: the hidden, expensive coordination cost that lands on internal teams when advisers stop at legal interpretation. Legal produces an answer. Technology asks what it means operationally. Risk asks how it becomes a control. Project management asks who owns what. The business asks what it can actually do. Someone internally spends enormous energy translating between all of them.

That is why in-house teams tell us working with us feels different, even before the work is complete. Fewer hand-offs. Clearer accountability. Less internal coordination.

We take responsibility for the substance of the work, the environment it has to operate in, and getting it delivered. What matters is that the work moves, and that it survives contact with the organisation.

There are three of us.

Nathan-Ross Adams

Founder

Nathan-Ross combines legal expertise in IT transactions with data science training and deep experience in data protection and AI. Before founding ITLawCo, he was a General Counsel, on the receiving end of outside counsel. He built the firm around what he wished he could have bought: work that was authoritative on substance, grounded in operating reality, and delivered through to something the organisation could use.

Jesica Parenzee

Strategic Operations Architect

Jesica leads operational and systems analysis. She examines the processes, systems and control environment our advice has to work in, testing whether legal answers survive the organisation as it actually exists, and where they need redesign to fit.

Amy-Rae Rispel

Projects Delivery Lead

Amy-Rae leads project delivery and user experience. She keeps complex engagements moving across stakeholders, workstreams, evidence, decisions and deadlines, and makes sure what we produce (contracts, frameworks, policies, decision documents) works for the people who have to use it.

The combination is deliberate. Good advice is not enough if it cannot work in the client’s operating environment, cannot be used by the client’s teams, or leaves the client to manage the machinery around it. We take responsibility for the substance, the delivery and the experience of the work.

When an engagement calls for expertise beyond the core team, we bring in trusted collaborators we have worked with and can vouch for. Accountability stays with us. The people leading your work stay directly involved.

Who we work with

Financial institutions, insurers and manufacturers are our most consistent clients. We also work with organisations where the problem has the same shape: healthcare and life sciences businesses with significant data or AI exposure, public sector bodies running major technology programmes, telecoms and platform operators, and investment firms doing technology diligence.

What our clients share is not sector but situation: material technology and data exposure, real regulatory complexity, sophisticated internal teams who know what they need from us, and problems where the legal answer is only part of the answer.

We work mainly with senior functions. General Counsel and Heads of Legal are our most frequent contacts, but engagements often involve Chief Data Officers, Chief Risk Officers, Chief Information Security Officers, Heads of Compliance and Legal Operations, and the boards and executive committees they report to.

Most engagements involve stakeholders at several levels: leadership setting direction, in-house counsel evaluating substance, technology and operations teams implementing the work. We move between those levels without hand-offs. The principals who present to the board also sit in the workshop with the engineering team.

We work mainly in South Africa and across African jurisdictions, and internationally where clients run cross-border programmes or value a regulatory perspective from outside the US and EU. Our experience was built in African industries where technology, law and operating reality rarely arrive in neat packages. We bring that perspective to clients everywhere.

How we work with clients

Most engagements begin with a scoped first piece of work: something concrete and useful that lets both sides decide whether a deeper engagement makes sense.

We price by scoped outcome, not by time. Fees reflect the value and responsibility of the defined outcome, not the internal labour behind it. First pieces of work are fixed-fee. Ongoing engagements are milestone-based or retained capacity. Hourly billing is the exception, used only where scope cannot be defined in advance.

Typical starting points include an AI deployment that needs governance before it goes live, a vendor estate with more contracts than anyone can track, a data protection programme stretched across jurisdictions, and a product launch carrying legal risk no one has mapped.

From there, engagements grow into ongoing advisory work, retained capacity or programme delivery, depending on what the client needs. The engagement grows with the trust it earns, not through account management.

We are direct about what we don’t do. We don’t produce documents without understanding the decision they support. We don’t stop at analysis where the problem needs operationalising. We don’t default to caution as a substitute for judgment. We are not a law firm, and we do not litigate or appear in court. If a mandate doesn’t fit, we’ll tell you and, where we can, point you to someone who fits better.

Talk to us

If you’re weighing a technology decision, sitting with a regulatory question, or sensing that your current advisers aren’t catching what you need, get in touch. Initial conversations are exploratory and confidential. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you.

Start a conversation

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