Browne Jacobson’s technology and operations director Abby Ewen has been promoted to chief operating officer at the UK top 50 law firm in a new role that began on 1 November.
Ewen, who has been a law firm IT manager since the early 1990s, will now sit on Browne Jacobson’s board alongside senior partner Caroline Green, managing partner Richard Medd and the remaining executives. Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Ewen, whose wide-ranging role already encompasses continuous improvement, vendor management, legal operations, health & safety and facilities, said of the board appointment: “That’s the important bit. I’m doing what I was doing before but now I can ensure that the innovation agenda is represented directly in the group responsible for strategic oversight of the firm.”
She added: “This is about putting technology and innovation in absolutely the right place.”
With technology now front and centre of law firm strategy we can expect more firms to be looking at appointing their technology head as COO and Ewen, who started at Browne Jacobson in September 2019 as its first female IT director, said: “Law firms can only bear a particular depth of structure, and you can’t have multiple layers if you’re relatively small as an organisation, so I do see this as the direction of travel.”
The last few years has seen the status of technology elevated significantly and Ewen said: “This is a seminal moment for technology; it’s moved from necessary evil to fundamental strategic direction setting and shaping of the firm.
“Gen AI has catalysed things. Because it’s so fundamental and democratised and freely available, including to our clients, it will change the size and shape of the organisation; our roles and responsibilities; and who we employ (which is likely to include more legal engineers.) It’s about the tide turning. I’ve been working in legal tech a long time and I’ve seen that evolution for a long time but it’s now more crucial than ever for people to get on board.”
This – at last – is going to present huge strategic opportunities for IT heads and also questions around a) how firms should structure their senior technology leadership and b) how legal technology heads rise to the challenge.
There is not one right answer, and Ewen says: “If you ask 100 law firms how they structure technology and innovation, you’ll get 100 different answers. They might structure it around existing people and skill sets. They might have a technically excellent CIO who they want to keep in this important role but hire someone adjacent who is responsible for heading up innovation. It depends on the size of the organisation and its ambition.”
However CIOs and IT directors are going to have to think about their own ambitions and referring to COO appointments being the direction of travel, Ewen observed: “That being said, your CIO who is still focused on the flashing lights on the back of the server is going to struggle to get a seat at a higher level.”