“Lawyers who have gone to a start-up may lose out in the short-term, but they make-up for it massively in the long-term,” Rupert Pearce told Legal Week’s sister magazine Legal Director in an interview at the beginning of this year.

Pearce, a former e-commerce partner at Linklaters, was one of the most high-profile lawyers to leave private practice for a technology company during the e-commerce boom by becoming COO of Swedish-technology company Cognition in April last year.