BigHand has appointed its APAC managing director Anthony Bleasdale to the newly created role of MD of document productivity as part of a restructure that sees BigHand focus on providing clients with the best domain expertise regardless of geography. While BigHand will still have in-region experts, going forward the 80-strong document productivity team across all regions will fall under Bleasdale, in a bid to better leverage BigHand’s global talent pool.
BigHand is divided between three core businesses: workflow, which is headed by North America president Eric Wangler; profitability, headed by Rob Stote and Tom Jones; and document productivity, headed by Bleasdale.
Jones founded Iridium Technology, which was acquired by BigHand in February this year. Following that acquisition, the UK-headquartered company has now reached 350 members of staff.
As part of its restructure, a new global steering committee comprised of the business heads and leaders from the likes of marketing, sales, support and implementation and product will meet each month.
In FY23 BigHand will launch a new document productivity customer programme, mirroring its existing programme for workflow customers. The workflow customer committee group in North America meet every six weeks to share learning and feedback.
BigHand’s document creation solution includes standardised templates, metadata stripping, and pitch and proposal software. Bleasdale’s appointment follows what he describes as a “hugely successful” year for document creation, and he told Legal IT Insider: “When we’re talking with customers and clients, what they want is easy and simple to use technology. The biggest output is document drafting and it needs to be not time consuming but easy to use. They want simple tools to deliver those documents and we have been really focused on that and creating a solution that delivers on its promise of being easy to use. The IT team doesn’t want something that is going to create a headache and the success of our solutions is because we don’t overcomplicate things.”
BigHand’s document productivity business now has around 1200 clients in North America and Asia Pacific and in the UK that has grown by 50-60 clients in the last year. Its acquisitions include UK template management vendor Iphelion in 2019.