As managing partner, I drive the firm forward while retaining the values that make it special. Commerciality, continuous improvement and collaboration are central to what I believe makes Francis Wilks & Jones both a great firm to work at and a great team to work with.
I am down to earth and easy to get on with. Clients value my experience, my commerciality and the way I embrace technology to improve service delivery and results.
As a founding partner of FWJ, I understand the challenges of running a business and can empathise with the many issues and pressures that it brings. I use this experience when advising clients and helping them to develop their own systems.
I was previously
- head of our debt recovery practice, developing state of the art collection platforms and integrating these with clients’ accounting systems to improve service delivery and increase recoveries.
- head of the commercial litigation team, covering a range of work, including high value fraud claims, director disqualification claims, contractual disputes, personal guarantee claims and various other insolvency litigation claims.
I have worked with a wide variety of clients, including leading members of UK Finance Association, SMEs, directors and shareholders, private clients, high-net-worth individuals, insolvency practitioners and trustees in bankruptcy.
Never losing sight of my focus on strong client relationships, I continually look for ways to innovate and improve our work through technology and systems.
My recent projects include:
- developing our innovative debt recovery service, Recovery+, a new, fully operational pre litigation platform which gives clients secure access to part of FWJ’s debt recovery system to run the pre litigation process themselves
- the rollout of a comprehensive CRM system aimed at streamlining and enhancing client relationships from end to end
- overseeing a complete redesign of the firm’s website and creating an informative and user friendly tool for prospective clients.
I am a legal expert on the Lexis Ask Panel for Lexis Nexis.
Working with Andy Wilks for over twenty years, his expertise and commerciality plus business drive for technical innovation and outstanding service delivery has enabled a successful and trusted relationship
Chief Operating Officer, Close Brothers Invoice Finance
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to be involved with some aspects of Andy Wilks’ Recovery+ software project, which is a result of his visionary ability to identify ways of utilising technology to support and supplement traditional methods of delivering legal services. Andy conceived and then steered development of this automated legal debt-letter cycle process, always mindful that the end-product had to be in a form that would enable his firm’s clients to adopt and use it readily. At the conception stage his detailed understanding of every aspect of the commercial debt recovery process proved invaluable. He then applied the same dynamism and strategic thinking to the development, testing and implementation phases of the project that he employed when he headed up his firm’s commercial litigation and debt recovery teams. The existence and success of Recovery+ is a testament to Andy’s ability to combine his detailed legal knowledge with the vision necessary to conceive a new ‘lawtech’ product, and the persistence required to develop a ground-breaking application.
Jonathan Fidler, compliance consultant at Legal Compliance Services
There is no one I would want leading my team more than Andy Wilks. Without his expertise, commitment and drive, let alone his support and assistance, we would not have won this case.
A director Andy defended against a director disqualification claim
