New London-based advisory, managed services and technology company Ethien has announced that it has joined the HighQ Alliance Network.
Ethien has yet to formally launch but has for the past year been building its business, led by co-founder and CEO Andy Loach, a former COO of Addleshaw Goddard’s respected Transaction Services Team.
Most recently Loach was a member of the strategic advisory board of Sabrefish, a spin off from global systems integrator Salmon. Salmon was founded and run by Ethien’s now chairman Chris Harvey until its sale to WPP in 2013, when he separated the insurance business of Salmon to become Sabrefish.
Ethien boasts a heavyweight senior leadership team including head of compliance and risk services Simon Pearson, who has held senior roles at Morgan Stanley and BNY Mellon, including as interim EMEA chief operating officer for BNY Mellon’s legal division; and Richard Bailey, head of technology and projects, who was a main board director at Salmon and has held various leadership roles at Bull Information Systems. Head of client engagement and Ethien co-founder Sue Pratt was previously global head of marketing at Salmon.
Joining the team most recently is management consultant Andrew Burgess, who has been appointed as strategic advisor. Burgess is co-author, with the London School of Economics, of ‘The Rise of Legal Services Outsourcing’ (Bloomsbury). He is currently a consultant specialising in robotic process automation (RPA), AI, legal services and impact sourcing. Before that, Burgess was a director at Source, Orbys and Datamonitor.
Ethien’s blended business model is to advise law firms and corporate legal teams on business transformation and process improvement, often by means of better use of technology, but also to offer its own managed services capability to take on routine work, freeing teams to work on higher value instructions. Currently Ethien is servicing this routine work via a partnership but ultimately it plans to provide its own in-house outsourcing capability.
It plans to provide a holistic service to clients, advising at the front end on the strategic business and process needs of the business while also implementing the technological changes required to effect that strategy.
Speaking of Ethien’s new partnership with HighQ, Loach said, “In our discussions with leading law firms, many partners have told us that clients are becoming relentless in their search for more value. They expect law firms to bring in new technologies which enable better, more cost effective ways of delivering legal work.
“Many law firms already use HighQ’s software for providing services like individual deal rooms and client extranets, so they already own an incredibly powerful and flexible technology platform that has the potential to digitally transform the way legal work is done. Our aim is to help law firms extract maximum value from the investment they have already made, enabling them to dramatically improve efficiency, quality and service levels and to grow their revenue.”