About - Ashbourne Consulting

about

Ashbourne’s Story.

The gap between “I left Big Law” and “I have a practice that runs well” is a problem the consulting market has largely ignored. Until now.

why ashbourne exists

the market left a gap. and we noticed.

Women attorneys are leaving Big Law in numbers the industry keeps finding ways not to talk about. When they go, 90% of them name workplace culture as the reason: the gender dynamics, structural hostility, and advancement that always felt just out of reach. They leave to build something better, on their own terms, for their own clients, in environments they can control.

What they discover instead is the operational reality of running a law practice. Billing, client intake, financial visibility, and the systems that keep the firm running. It all just piles up on their desks.

90%

of women who leave Big Law name workplace culture as the reason they left.

Solo and boutique women-led practices fall below the revenue threshold that attracts senior consulting firms and above what a legal assistant or productivity tool can fix.

The consulting market has largely decided that gap isn’t worth catering to. Ashbourne was designed specifically for it, by someone who’s done the work from two directions.

jamie’s story

meet the founder

Jamie Toscani picked up her first John Grisham novel at 10 years old and decided then and there she was going to become a lawyer. She followed that dream through a Paralegal Studies degree, internships, legal assistant roles, and eventually to Chicago, where she worked as a paralegal inside the kind of firms she’d read about all those years ago.

“I forgot you had a degree.”

What she found there sent her in a different direction. She was often called “the girl.” Administrative work got piled on her desk that made her actual job impossible. And someone once told her, with genuine surprise, “I forgot you had a degree.” She watched how women were treated in those environments and decided she wasn’t going to take the LSAT after all.

She left the legal industry in 2015 and spent the next decade building operations expertise from the inside of her own online business. She describes it as “11 years earning a self-educated MBA.” She’s worked across multiple six- and seven-figure businesses, and has become an expert at walking into a business, understanding what’s happening versus what the owner believes is happening, and building something better.

At the end of 2025, a research rabbit hole produced statistics she couldn’t ignore. Women are 56.2% of law school graduates, but only 28.4% of solo practitioners. And 90% of the women who leave Big Law name workplace culture as the reason they left.

She already knew that story. She’d lived a version of it a decade earlier, and left before she ever got the chance to become the attorney she’d planned to be.

the numbers that started it

56.2%

of law school graduates are women.

28.4%

of solo practitioners are women.

90%

of women leaving Big Law name workplace culture as the reason.