In a very positive start to 2007, Headfast has appointed Richard Hainebach as its new Chairman with special responsibility for business strategy and development. Richard brings with him a great deal of experience in publishing and online information services. He is also a long-time user of the company’s software and services. Sue Hyman, one of Headfast’s founding directors, said when announcing the appointment, “I am delighted to welcome Richard on board. His knowledge and experience of our core application areas will be a great asset as we expand both within our existing markets and into new ones.”

“Headfast is an extremely exciting company to be involved with; it is defined by excellent people and technologies,” said Richard. “I look forward to being part of the team and building on the company’s rich experience of providing truly powerful and useful services in the next generation of web applications.”

Born in South Africa, Richard is a successful consultant and entrepreneur specialising in legal publishing and information management. He has been a business strategy adviser to Thomson Legal & Regulatory since selling his own company, ELLIS Publications in November 1999 to the Thomson Corporation, one of the world’s largest information companies. Richard set up ELLIS Publications in 1986 to provide a European legal information service. By the time it was bought by Thomson, ELLIS Publications had established itself as a global leader in European Union law by enriching the EU’s own materials with a wealth of extra data and by making it very easy to search and to view. Earlier in his career, Richard worked for the European Commission on a variety of major projects concerned with the storage, indexing and retrieval of legal information. This was followed by a spell with Elsevier, another global information and publishing company, where he again specialised in the legal marketplace.

Mike Hyman, the Managing Director of Headfast, said: “Richard is one of the pioneers and stalwarts of European legal information services. We first met in 1977 during the tendering process for a European Commission study looking at software for legal information storage and retrieval. Since then our paths have crossed many times until, ultimately, he became a client in the mid-1980s. Firstly as a dealer selling our software in the Netherlands and later at ELLIS Publications using Headfast as the software for its very successful information publishing business on CD-ROM and the Internet. We have also worked together on a number of projects for Thomson Legal & Regulatory in the past few years.”

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