Professor Rosalind Avery spent twelve years at the University of Bristol studying governance failures in professional services organisations. Her particular interest was the gap between the stated values of professional firms and their actual incentive structures.
The gap was consistent. Firms said: we work for the client. The incentive structure said: we work for the billing target. The billing target always won, not because practitioners were dishonest, but because the governance structure made that outcome inevitable.
Her 2015 paper, "Stakeholder Equity in Professional Services," proposed a model. Not a regulatory intervention. A constitutional one. If you change who owns the firm, you change whose interests the firm serves.
The paper sat in academic journals for three years. Then three things happened.
First, the cooperative economy had a moment. There was renewed interest in non-hierarchical governance structures in the late 2010s, following several high-profile corporate failures where conventional governance had been inadequate.
Second, a solicitor in Manchester named Eleanor Cross read the paper.
Third, Professor Avery received funding to turn the model into a usable framework.
FairShares Society was incorporated in 2018. Its purpose: to develop, document, and support the adoption of FairShares governance by professional services firms.
Ben Nakamura joined as Secretary in 2019, bringing cooperative governance experience from the credit union sector. Saoirse Flynn joined as Development Officer in 2021, with a background in cooperative development consultancy.
Eleanor Cross contacted FairShares Society in early 2022. She had just founded Meridian Law and was looking for a governance model that would prevent billing target culture from re-entering the firm.
Meridian Law adopted FairShares governance in September 2022. It was the first law firm to do so under the FairShares Society framework.
Rosalind wrote the case study. It became the primary evidence base for approaching other professional services firms.
Halcyon Chambers became a FairShares associate member in 2024. Barristers chambers present different governance challenges from solicitor firms - the self-employed status of barristers complicates equity distribution. Saoirse Flynn is developing an adapted framework for chambers.
FairShares and SAC address adjacent problems from different angles.
SAC asks: are you accountable for outcomes? FairShares asks: is your governance structure capable of producing those outcomes?
A firm can join SAC without adopting FairShares. A firm can adopt FairShares without joining SAC. But firms that do both have addressed both the structural problem (incentives) and the accountability problem (outcomes). Meridian Law and Halcyon Chambers are both members of both.
The relationship is not formal. It is philosophical. Ben Nakamura wrote about it in 2024.