Justine Edelman is the founder of JLE Marketing and, with her partner Dan, the clever legal directory submission platform handyside.legal. Living deep in the Kent countryside, they have created a delicious spread of jams, jellies and a unique orange flavoured gin.
Justine tells The Professionals all about her Other Life.
Justine and Dan Edelman developed handyside.legal in 2014 when she was engaged by a barristers’ chambers, 3 Verulam Buildings, to write their directory submissions.
“I was working on the dining room table surrounded by piles of paper when my husband, Dan, who helped develop the Fidessa equity trading system, said ‘there has to be a better way of doing this’, says Justine.
So they developed a secure, web-based system that compiles legal directory submissions and their referee spreadsheets perfectly in seconds. It has been through many iterations since then but enables them to provide a great service to far more clients than one person could.
Tell us about your ‘other life’
We live in the Kent countryside and we both enjoy cooking, gardening, foraging and, of course, eating and drinking. We have a 120-year-old cherry orchard, apple trees, plum trees, some gages, a cobnut platt and a lot of hedges where wild things grow. So, we make jams and jellies, both savoury and sweet, pickled plums and cucumbers, chutneys, we dry mushrooms, make mushroom ketchup and we bottle summer fruit for the winter. We have brandied figs too, which are lovely at Christmas.
Every summer, Dan devises a house cocktail. Last year it was the ‘twinkle’ which was based on our homemade elderflower syrup, with either vodka or gin and topped up with either soda water or fizz. This year ,it’s the ‘fig leaf cocktail’: one part vodka, one part fresh lime juice, two parts homemade fig leaf syrup. Both are delicious, but dangerously deceptive.
We are considering options for next year. Perhaps something with Mirabelles, tiny golden plums that come from the Alsace-Lorraine region in France, as we have a couple of Mirabelle trees in the garden. Or maybe rosehip syrup, or something to do with cobnuts or walnuts.
How did it start?
Having experimented with homemade sloe gin, hoar brandy, hedgerow whisky and some truly unfortunate mixtures, we went to Northumberland to see friends and while we were there enjoyed a slug of orange gin with a slice of ginger cake in the drizzle on a path in the fells. Apparently, a long-dead butler had made the gin. It was absolutely delicious, so we came home determined to make some ourselves.
After a few trial runs of some forty bottles a time we got it right. When we were bottling the perfect recipe a friend who is a wine merchant dropped by. She absolutely loved it and offered to market it for us if we would make more. So we made 200 litres. The production season is very short as you can only buy the Seville oranges we use for about six weeks in January/February. It was hard work for Dan.
Is it a delicious hobby, or a growing business
It is still a bit of both. We do one Christmas fair every year and tend to sell everything we take. I did try to suggest to Dan that he up production to 1,000 litres and he pointed out that it would take him six weeks straight to peel the oranges, even using our special orange-peeling machine from Italy! He wasn’t keen.
What next for Updown Orange Gin?
Happy for it to just tick along as an enjoyable adjunct to our legal directories work. It is so different.
How can people find the drink
As a small batch, artisanal product, it is only available directly from us. We are always at the Christmas Market at the Night Yard near Canterbury in early December or you can email us at daniel@edelman-family.me.uk.
What next for handyside.legal?
It is very exciting. We are expanding our client base and developing the system for law firms, so are in full project management mode over the Summer. And it is our busiest time for marketing as we get very busy from September through to May/June when we focus on our summer lives.