There is a peculiar kind of victory that feels exactly like defeat. A tribunal rules in your favour. A judgment arrives, crisp and authoritative. The lawyers close their binders. And then the other side simply declines to do the thing it has been ordered to do. The money does not move. The negotiation does not begin. The legal answer was correct; reality has failed to notice.
Highgate lives in that gap. The London strategic advisory firm calls its territory “dispute resolution and special situations,” but the plainer description is more interesting: it is hired when an important person has run out of obvious moves. The clients are CEOs, governments, political leaders, wealthy families and prominent individuals. Their problems may involve a hostile counterparty, a sovereign award, a reputational threat, a distressed company or a philanthropic ambition that has become politically complicated. In each case, the normal professional lanes have started to blur.
A lawyer sees claims and remedies. An investigator sees facts and sources. A communications adviser sees audiences. A diplomat sees interests, protocol and room for compromise. Highgate’s proposition is that a high-stakes mess contains all four at once. Its consultants are drawn from intelligence, law, government, finance, media and the military, then assembled around a problem rather than a department.
The first failure is often the story everyone believes
Thomas Eymond-Laritaz, Highgate’s founder, trained as an engineer before entering politics and public affairs. He worked for the French prime minister, advised the Bulgarian prime minister and Georgian president, and spent five years in Kyiv as chief of staff to investor and philanthropist Victor Pinchuk. Before starting Highgate in January 2020, he held senior roles at APCO Worldwide and Mercury. It is a career built less around one industry than around the recurring mechanics of influence.
On the Intelligence Advantage podcast, Eymond-Laritaz described an anonymised dispute involving an award against a foreign government that would not pay. The formal position looked immovable. Highgate sent experienced people into the country to learn what the responsible minister was telling the government’s leadership. The team concluded that the information moving upward was false - and, more important, that the minister had an economic interest in continuing the dispute. More legal spending meant more personal benefit.
That detail changed the map. The obstacle was not the strength of the award. It was an incentive hidden inside the machinery meant to resolve it. You cannot persuade someone with a better legal argument when the person is being rewarded not to be persuaded.
The most useful question in a deadlocked dispute may be the least legal one: who benefits from keeping it alive?Highgate’s operating logic, in one sentence
This is what the firm means by creating leverage outside the courtroom. It works alongside lawyers and investigators rather than pretending to replace them. Intelligence explains the players. Communications can alter the audience. Political counsel identifies who can move whom. Negotiation turns those ingredients into an offer the other side can accept. The tools are not the result. Movement is the result.
A dispute in four verbs
Highgate’s public teaching frameworkFour services, one underlying product
Highgate presents four practices. Dispute Resolution is the most distinctive: building pressure and a route to settlement when proceedings alone are too slow or too easy to ignore. CEO Advisory is counsel for moments when a leader’s commercial problem is also political, legal or reputational. Private Clients covers crises, disputes, reputation, legacy and philanthropy for wealthy families. Sovereign Advisory ranges from financial communications and country promotion to state-owned enterprises and conflict management.
The underlying product is the same in each practice: coordinated judgment. A conventional consultancy can sell a repeatable method. A software company can show a demo and a price per seat. Highgate sells bespoke projects led by senior people, and it does not publish fees. The economics are those of professional services - expertise and time applied to situations where the downside is large enough to justify both.
The tidy version
- Law answers the legal question
- PR handles the press
- Investigators gather facts
- Government affairs calls officials
The Highgate version
- Map the whole decision system
- Find incentives and pressure points
- Protect the client while applying leverage
- Build a credible route back to negotiation
Its market neighbours include strategic communications firms such as Brunswick and APCO, risk and investigations groups such as FTI Consulting, specialist reputation advisers, political consultancies and elite law firms. Highgate’s difference is not that it invented any one of their disciplines. It is that it refuses to let the disciplines produce separate plans.
The firm grew by hiring biographies, not job titles
Highgate began with one founder in 2020. It doubled revenue in 2021 and reached 18 consultants by early 2022. By late 2023 it had 38. Four hires announced in 2024 included a former White House national-security official, a British Army intelligence and liaison officer, a corporate-affairs adviser and a US State Department policy adviser. At its fifth anniversary in January 2025, the firm said it had 45 permanent consultants speaking more than 20 languages.
The senior-adviser roster extends the model without forcing every speciality onto the permanent payroll. Tim Clissold, a China dispute-resolution specialist with more than four decades of in-country experience, joined through a 2025 partnership. Former UK minister Sir Alan Duncan added Middle East, energy and diplomatic experience. Leslie Stephenson arrived in 2026 with more than 30 years across international banking, insurance, regulation and governance. They are less a row of honorary portraits than a shelf of specific lenses.
The culture advertised to younger recruits is correspondingly practical: two paid, six-month internship programmes each year, with mentoring and on-the-job training. The company also publicises flexible and family-friendly policies. That matters in a business whose public identity is senior expertise. A bench of impressive résumés is useful; a system that teaches people how those résumés work together is the harder asset.
What a board can steal for free
Most readers will never need a sovereign-dispute adviser. The portable lesson is procedural. Highgate’s public material repeatedly treats intelligence as something to be assessed, not admired. The person who collects information can become attached to the source, the effort and the conclusion. Public intelligence institutions separate collection from analysis for a reason. A company considering a deal, a settlement or a public response can imitate that separation without hiring a 45-person consultancy.
A small-team version of the method
- Write down the stated reason the situation is stuck.
- Map who gains and who loses if it remains stuck.
- Separate the people gathering facts from those recommending action.
- Give one credible person permission to challenge the favourite explanation.
- Define movement in observable terms: a meeting, a payment, a concession or a signed agreement.
The method has boundaries. Leverage without a lawful and ethical basis becomes coercion. Communications cannot rescue weak evidence. Intelligence cannot manufacture an interest in settlement when every relevant actor prefers stalemate. And multidisciplinary advice becomes expensive theatre if nobody has authority to reconcile competing recommendations. Highgate is most useful when the formal route is necessary but insufficient, the decision system can be mapped, and the client is willing to hear that its own account may be incomplete.
That last condition may be the scarce one. Leaders call advisers because they want certainty, just as a patient wants a diagnosis. Highgate’s work suggests that the useful adviser first makes the room less certain: perhaps the dispute is not really about the claim; perhaps the hostile headline is not the central risk; perhaps the person who appears irrational is responding perfectly rationally to an incentive nobody has noticed.
A court can determine what should happen. A board can decide what it wants to happen. Between those two statements sits the untidy human system that determines what actually happens. Highgate has made a business of drawing that system on the wall.