UK-headquartered legal engineering company Syke continues its run of big name hires with the appointment of former Royal Mail legal procurement head Sarah Barrett-Vane as its head of legal procurement, spend management & eBilling.
A former lawyer, Barrett-Vane transitioned into legal procurement, then legal operations and legal technology implementation. She was director of legal operations at Royal Mail for five years where she worked with Syke founderand CEO Alistair Maiden on automating the NDA process. She has been consulting since 2018, including carrying out a number of legal panel reviews and implementing multiple ebilling solutions for clients.
Barrett-Vane said: “It’s great to join forces with Alistair again and I’m looking forward to leading the charge on legal procurement, spend management & ebilling. Together when I was at Royal Mail we automated the NDA process, running a pilot with Contract Express, and helping save the company £50k a year in external legal fees, while saving the in-house team time and hassle. It reinforced my view that legal technology can help revolutionise how complex organisations function, driving operational efficiencies that deliver strategic benefits.”
Elsewhere ContractPodAI has hired former Amelia (Ipsoft) global GC and corporate secretary Jerry Levine as chief evangelist. Levine, who is based in New York, was a ContractPodAi customer and advocate and we spoke to him about the selection of ContractPodAi in April 2020.
Levine said: “I believe ContractPodAi brings immense value to organizations. As general counsel we need to ask ourselves how we can spend less time buried in administrative tasks and become what I like to call ‘awesome lawyers’ – a lawyer who acts as a strategic lead in an organization. With ContractPodAi, I have seen firsthand how this works for legal departments and how using the system makes legal departments work efficiently.”
Prior to joining ContractPodAi, Levine held leadership and consulting positions at both public and privately held companies, including Axiom and LexisNexis. He also founded a start-up focused law firm.