Thomas will help take advantage of new business globally, including a managed services offering under which Pinnacle supports customers across third-party products.
Gareth Thomas is set to join Pinnacle from Intapp as global head of sales, we can reveal. He will be working with the UK-headquartered legal technology consultancy on building its business on both sides of the Atlantic, with a particular focus on Pinnacle’s long-established Intapp and Thomson Reuters partnerships.
Thomas will again be working with Pinnacle’s chief executive officer David Lumsden, who he has worked for on two previous occasions – at Tikit (now part of Advanced) and then at iManage RAVN, where on both occasions Thomas held the role of sales director. Pinnacle brings together a number of former Tikit employees, including chief strategy officer Mike Bailey.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider about the move, Thomas (pictured below) said: “Pinnacle has excellent existing partnerships with both Intapp and Thomson Reuters that generate significant revenue and which we all believe can be expanded upon and grown. There are a lot of additional benefits for our mutual clients, and it will be my remit to help develop those accounts and increase the revenues.”
He added: “My relationships at Intapp are going to remain very strong and they are supportive of me moving to Pinnacle. They are happy that I am staying within the Intapp community.”
Thomas joined Intapp as part of its acquisition of OnePlace in 2018 and for the past year has been the sales lead for a handful of Intapp’s biggest clients. He told Legal IT Insider: “I see myself more as a new business guy, which is hard in a company the with the structure and size of Intapp. I’m excited about working for a smaller company where I can have a more direct impact in terms of growth.
“This is not a case of me not wanting to stay at Intapp, but more of me wanting to work at Pinnacle because I see an exciting opportunity to work with David and Mike and a whole bunch of the development and implementation guys that I have known from Tikit days and beyond. There’s so much I think we can do with our mutual clients and people that aren’t yet Pinnacle clients.”
Pinnacle works with law firms in the UK, Europe and United States in managing their data migration, implementations, integrations and upgrades as well as selling its own software such as proposal automation solution PitchPerfect (formerly Enable Business Solutions) and a proprietary data quality management suite.
It is growing its book of business in the United States, where in May 2022, Val Reece was appointed as Pinnacle’s first chief operating officer. Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Lumsden said: “As Pinnacle grows its managed services and software sales we needed somebody with Gareth’s experience and relationships to join us to ensure we deliver the best experience to our clients and partners.”
The ambition is for Pinnacle to be customers’ one, go-to technology partner that can support them across product lines. Thomas said: “Where we’re selling a managed service, Pinnacle has its own implementation and support as well as its own technology that makes the ability to support the client much easier. There are products such as a data monitoring tool that ensures that information is kept in sync. So, if you’re upgrading 3E, or Intapp Intake and Conflicts, it will ensure that nothing has been missed out and that going forward the data stays in sync, which makes Pinnacle’s ability to support big 24/7 3E and Intapp installations much easier.
“I don’t think that anyone has the same level of people, experience and partnership level contacts as well as the technology that Pinnacle has, and that is going to be a massive area of growth.”
caroline@legaltechnology.com