Jeff Wright has joined UK top 100 law firm Foot Anstey as director of innovation. He spoke to Legal IT Insider about the role and the national law firm’s client ambitions.
Jeff Wright has joined Foot Anstey in the newly created role of director of client innovation, as the fast-growing national UK law firm looks to leverage technology to win higher value client work.
Wright was previously transformation and change director at TLT. He joined Foot Anstey at the start of May for a 12-month period, arriving in the same month that Martin Hirst took over as managing partner. Formerly head of real estate, Hirst was part of the team that in 2021 launched a HighQ-based real estate platform to help property clients manage and analyse their portfolio in real time.
Wright said: “I’ve been brought in to look at what the firm is currently doing in the client innovation space. That includes both front facing client delivery technology and services, and then what we can do in the middle office around how we organise ourselves to deliver work more efficiently.”
He adds: “Foot Anstey are really ambitious and have come on a journey over the last few years and want to push to that next level in the value chain for client work. I’ve been brought in to look at some of the things we need to do to achieve that.”
Wright will be building on the infrastructure put in place since 2018 by chief technology officer Dave Bloor. Foot Anstey is a Microsoft 365 customer and is swapping out Thomson Reuters MatterSphere for Peppermint’s case management system.
Wright said: “Dave Bloor’s IT strategy all points in the right direction, and his team have already built the infrastructure and some good client facing technology, so for me it’s a case of how we scale up and grow that, and what resources do we need to bring in.”
Bloor was also part of the team working on the real estate platform, which extracts key information from leases and deeds, such as key dates; access rights; and how much rent is paid and puts it into a database from which Foot Anstey can set up notifications and alert clients of key decisions coming up in the next 12 months. The platform falls under a new design thinking led approach branded ‘Ingenuity’ by the firm. Speaking to Legal IT Insider in 2021, Bloor said of Ingenuity: “We got into a room with our clients and took them through a design thinking process. We tied that back to opportunities and how we are delivering services as a business, and we brought it together, so we are now co-designing client solutions with clients.”
Foot Anstey is sector focussed, and Wright says that there are opportunities for the mid-market firm to leverage its best qualities to reach clients that are normally serviced by much bigger law firms.
He says: “I’ve been really impressed by how much Foot Anstey punch above their weight. We are regularly competing against firms that are much bigger, such as TLT and Eversheds in the energy space.”