LDC Top 50 2024
Gary Gallen
Founder and CEO
rradar
“I’m stubborn as hell,” says Gary Gallen, corporate law veteran and founder of legal specialist firm, rradar. “That’s how I built the first commercial law product in 30 years.” rradar helps more than 125,000 businesses to operate legally and fairly.
“It took longer than I hoped to get going,” says Gallen. But he’s now convinced one of the world’s biggest insurers to become partners and is set to double revenues. He’s driven by a desire for justice: “I’ve locked people up, I’ve got them out of prison, but the main thing I’ve realised is that most people don’t set out to break the law: they just don’t know any better.”
I went all in, cashed in my pension, remortgaged the house, even sold the car to build rradar and its first proprietary technology.”
Q&A
Why did you risk it all to start rradar?
My son Daniel was born with chronic disabilities. He has a rare type of Down syndrome, and autism, which also results in a number of physical difficulties. He’s been on life support several times throughout his life and I’ve had to resuscitate him when he stopped breathing; he would sleep in my arms because he struggled to breathe laid down. I had to change my whole outlook on life and work. My old firm was sympathetic for a fortnight, but insisted that I still had to hit all of my targets and do everything as I previously did. There was little tolerance or understanding for my difficulties. I found a way of coping, but decided there was more to life.
Tell me about those challenging early days?
Trying to get investment during a recession for a model no one had seen before… that was interesting. I went all in, cashed in my pension, remortgaged the house, even sold the car to build rradar, and its first proprietary technology. We quickly became a profitable business, and are now on course to double turnover.
What’s so special about rradar?
Our people and how we impact the lives and businesses of our clients. This makes rradar special. We help businesses of all sizes to achieve their goals by preventing and managing risks from the beginning – not just when legal experts need to step in to fix and contain them.
Through our holistic model of services, clients can access everything they need to prevent and manage legal risk. They can use our library of resources, or connect with an intelligent legal assistant ‘app’ to get instant answers or, should they need further support, get passported through to a team of lawyers and specialists.
We also have our own insurance company, rrelentless, which protects customers through innovative insurance covers. We help hundreds of thousands of customers to protect their livelihoods.
