We bring you the latest senior legal tech moves across the globe, and also who is hiring!
APAC
Herbert Smith Freehills has promoted three people within its Alternative Legal Services (ALT) practice. Sarah d’Oliveyra and Emily Coghan have been promoted to director. Arjuna Guruge has become an associate director, eDiscovery and legal technology for Australia and Asia.
ALT has a team of more than 350 lawyers, technologists and legal analysts globally providing clients with tech-led solutions to high-volume, document-intensive legal work. Over 150 of the team are in Australia.
ALT’s managing partner, Libby Jackson MBE, said: “Sarah, Emily and Arjuna have the formidable multi-disciplinary skills needed to help our clients achieve their business goals.
“Our ALT operation in Australia is going from strength to strength. We have a large team across the country working to deliver value for clients, and that is in large part due to the skills and leadership of Sarah, Emily and Arjuna. I wish them all the best in their new roles.”
UK
Rachita Maker has taken on the new role of global head of legal ops, tech and consulting at UK-headquartered, London Stock Exchange-listed firm DWF. Maker was previously vice president at Tata Communications and before that India delivery head for legal services at Integreon.
Russel James has joined the innovation and legal technology team at Addleshaw Goddard. James was formerly at Plexus Law in a hybrid legal and IT role, split between property law and IT development. He joins Addleshaw Goddard as a senior legal technologist.
Darren Broughton has taken on the role of IT at UK top 50 law firm Clyde & Co following its merger with BLM. Broughton was previously head of information technology at BLM, where during his 23 years at the firm he progressed from a service desk analyst role to the top role.
Broughton has received plenty of congratulations on LinkedIn on the new role, but it’s worth noting that the entire team are now part of Clyde & Co, and it’s not that Broughton has moved firms.
Stu Gooderham has started in a new data science role at Wilson Allen. Commenting on LinkedIn, Gooderham, who was previously VP of sales, said: “I’m delighted to share the news that I’m starting a new position as VP Business Development, Data Science at Wilson Allen and am excited to be working with James and the excellent team here!”
His promotion follows the acquisition by Intapp of Wilson Allen’s pre-bill solution Billstream, and a 14-strong team led by COO Shishir Shetty.
Other appointments at Wilson Allen include Rich Maurer, who is now senior director, business development (Intapp).
Linklaters has appointed Martin Laing as head of its contract lawyer offering Re:link. Laing re-joined Linklaters in 2019 to help launch Re:link, having been a managing associate at the magic circle firm between 2006 and 2009.
Re:link offers flexible resourcing solutions to Linklaters clients and is part of Linklaters wider alternative legal services offering headed by Jas Mundae. It is not a standalone business.
Laing said: “What I loved from the start was Linklaters’ belief that we can offer lawyers flexibility and choice in their careers without compromising on quality. Linklaters’ clients come to us with their most challenging and niche resourcing needs, which means we can provide our consultants with access to some of the most varied and challenging work in the market.”
Before Linklaters, Laing was senior executive officer to the managing partner at Ashurst, responsible for helping to deliver business transformation projects. He joined Re:link in 2019 as senior lawyer relationship manager, and was promoted to business development manager in 2020.
UK top 100 law firm Kennedys has announced its second ‘Innovator of the Year’ award as it continues to recognise and reward colleagues’ efforts to transform legal services.
Sandip Sidhu impressed judges with her commitment to supporting Kennedys IQ, the company launched in 2020 to develop smart technology products for clients. She was described as “essential” to its work and “unmatched in her knowledge, efforts and enthusiasm” by colleagues who put her forward.
Karim Derrick, product and innovation director, Kennedys IQ, said: “Sandip has been a brilliant advocate of our work and an example of the real focus and dedication innovation requires. It is with great pleasure that we present her with this award, which is so richly deserved. We would like to thank everyone who took part, showing that the commitment to innovation and our clients is firm-wide.”
And Haley O’Brien has taken on the role of chair of Thomson Reuters Transforming Women’s Leadership in the Law program (TWLL). O’Brien is a strategic client director at TR. The program seeks to address the structural barriers and cultural change needed to enable women to succeed in the legal industry.
North America
Court docketing vendor ECFX has hired Niles Ritter as senior software engineer. Ritter spent almost over 21 years at Thomson Reuters as a system architect and joins from Y Meadows where he was principal software engineer.
This is the latest in a string of former TR hires. In February Dora Tynes and Dustin Davis joined as director of client success and director of sales respectively. Last year Scott Norby joined as director of sales. Both Norby and ECFX founder Dan O’Day worked at TR Elite.
Commenting on Ritter’s arrival on LinkedIn, ECFX said: “Niles is a mathematician by passion and training, with over 35 years of experience in software architecture, language and design. While working for NASA he created the popular GeoTiff image interchange standard that has become an archive standard in use by the US Library of Congress. During his 20-year tenure at Thomson Reuters Elite, he specialised in developing compilers, code, and tools to help legal and financial domain experts easily express their business system designs in more ‘natural’ domain languages. More recently, in his work at AI service provider Y-Meadows, he developed standard idioms in JSON for easily defining and generating microservices for cloud-based business processes.”
Miranda Riendeau has joined legal tech consultancy Theory and Principle as sales director. Riendeau was previously an account executive at Zoom, and before that, technology sales executive at animal health tech firm Covetrus.
UK-headquartered legal technology consultancy SYKE has hired Wendy Riggs and April Morris to bolster its legal technology and operations team in North America. Both are based on the West Coast. Riggs is a veteran of Airbnb, Twitter and Zynga. Morris was hired for her project management and operations experience and financial services compliance background. She was previously director of client engagement and operations at Strategic Business Operations and before that at Quail Lodge & Golf Club.
For other movers and shakers don’t miss our monthly Orange Rag newsletter, which is the legal tech bible of everything that has happened in the month.
Hiring!
UK
Herbert Smith Freehills is looking for a legal operations manager, based in Belfast. Commenting on the role Jacob Capleton, legal operations specialist at the firm said: “This role is hugely important and hugely exciting. Looking for people with LPM and a solid track record of managing rock star teams.” For more see: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/3122187931/
US
Johnny Shearman, COO at Keidan Harrison, is looking for someone to join the firm’s finance function as an accounts manager, responsible for the firm’s internal accounts function. It is a part time role with flexibility to work from the office and home. Here’s the firm’s recruitment portal: https://keidanharrison.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=31
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