About Taleist
Both sides of the pitch
Steven Lewis has instructed law firms as a client, among them Clifford Chance, and worked in business development inside one. Since 1997 he has written copy for clients including Rolex.
The firm
The intelligence agency for professional services
Steven Lewis founded Taleist in Sydney in 2010. It finds out why clients choose one professional services firm over another. Then it builds AI that helps a firm become the one clients choose.
There are two ways in. Start with the one your firm has already decided to fund.
Who does the work
The client, the insider, the writer
Steven Lewis read law at Oxford and graduated in 1992. Then he crossed to the client’s side of the table. For two years he worked for an international hospitality group, instructing law firms on its behalf, among them Clifford Chance and Simmons & Simmons. The work ran across Asia, the USA and the Middle East: immigration, intellectual property, employment and litigation.
From the client’s side he moved to the publisher’s. From 1994 to 1997 he was commissioning editor of two legal journals at Sweet & Maxwell, learning what busy professionals read and what they skip.
Then he moved to newspapers. Until 2002 he wrote for the South China Morning Post, the Financial Times, Esquire and GQ, and two weekly columns in the Sunday Morning Post.
The journalism also won him business readers, who made him a copywriter in Hong Kong. He has written direct-response copy since 1997, for clients including Rolex, Intel and Microsoft. Direct response is writing that gets measured: the reader acts, or doesn’t.
He moved to Australia at the end of 2002. From 2003 to 2004 he worked in business development inside a top-tier Australian law firm, where he saw what a client never sees: how a firm decides what to say about itself, and who has to agree.
He began working with AI in February 2021, 21 months before ChatGPT launched.
That’s the thread. He has been the client choosing the firm, the insider who saw how a firm sells itself, and the writer whose words have to make someone act. So Taleist’s work starts where the decision is made: with the client.
The work
What the work has produced
AI training for about 400 business development professionals, which Steven designed, wrote and delivered.
An AI writing tool rolled out to thousands of people at a law firm, built to help them write more persuasively and in the firm’s own voice.
A direct-response campaign that a CMO presented to the board as the model for marketing the firm’s expertise.
This work is confidential. Taleist doesn’t say who it was for, and wouldn’t name your firm.
Clients
Names you can check
Organisations Steven has trained or advised: Arnold Bloch Leibler, Arup, Australian Marketing Institute, Clayton Utz, FB Rice, GHD, Hall & Wilcox, MinterEllison, NDY, Northrop Consulting Engineers.
Copywriting clients include: Rolex, Intel, Microsoft.
Spoken at, published in and quoted in
Not sure which way in?
Book a 30-minute call
Tell us the work in front of you: the pitches you keep losing, the proposals that eat a week, the AI nobody can show a return on. You’ll hear which service fits. And if AI is the wrong answer, we’ll say so.
Prefer email? asi@taleist.agency