New managed legal services, technology and advisory firm Ethien has hired Osborne Clarke consultant and former Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer partner Paul Taylor as its head of business solutions as it also announces a new strategic partnership with RAVN Systems.
Taylor, who joined OC as a partner in its digital business team in 2007, will work with Ethien’s law firm and in-house legal clients to develop solutions that help improve quality and efficiency and reduce risk within legal services delivery. He will also act as Ethien’s general counsel.
For the past three years Taylor has worked on service delivery improvement within OC, designing many of the solutions developed for the firm’s clients. This involved the development of integrated solutions allowing OC’s lawyers to collaborate directly with in-house counsel on a common work platform. Projects included a corporate due diligence platform which is now in use for a range of clients from venture capital houses and private equity firms to serial corporate acquirers. Solutions were developed for all departments within the firm from real estate, through pensions and employee incentives, litigation support, tribunal management and land acquisition for development companies.
Prior to joining OC, Taylor was a partner at Freshfields and Orchards in London.
Ethien is led by a heavyweight management team including co-founder and CEO Andy Loach, a former COO of Addleshaw Goddard’s respected Transaction Services Team.
Commenting on the appointment, Loach said, “Paul combines many years’ experience as a practising lawyer at leading UK law firms and a deep understanding of legal processes with the ability to design innovative and practical technology solutions. This inter-disciplinary approach delivers huge business benefits to both law firms and their clients.”
Meanwhile, Ethien’s partnership with RAVN Systems, specialists in artificial intelligence and enterprise search technology, will combine the power of RAVN’s market-leading AI with Ethien’s legal services offerings to dramatically improve transactional efficiency by automatically reading, interpreting and summarising key information from documents and unstructured data.
RAVN Systems has broad and deep experience with unstructured data processing and offers innovative search-based and cognitive computing solutions. Loach said: “In-house legal teams are focussed on delivering a better value and higher quality service to their businesses. They also expect their law firms to bring in new services and technologies which enable better, more cost effective ways of delivering legal work. RAVN will allow our clients to automate key aspects of very time-consuming and traditionally manual processes, such as due diligence projects. The benefits are huge, in time, cost and quality.”
Peter Wallqvist, CEO at RAVN Systems, added: “Ethien is a great addition to the RAVN partner network. They have deep experience within the legal sector and an excellent understanding of how automation can benefit both law firms and their in-house clients. I’m very excited about our partnership and looking forward to working with Ethien in the future.”
In February Ethien announced that it has joined the HighQ Alliance Network.