Clyde & Co’s business manager to the CEO and until July global head of projects and change Sophie Wakenell, is joining legal business transformation consultancy Alt-V as an associate and legal operations strategist, we can reveal. Alt-V Law, co-founded by Natalie Kuebler and Allister Spencer, provides advice on strategy, process analysis and technology adoption, and this hire will bolster its capacity in finance, risk and compliance globally.
Wakenell has worked in professional services for the last two decades in roles spanning finance, operations, projects and change management. At Clyde & Co she was responsible for setting up and supporting the enterprise PMO during a period when Clyde & Co doubled its revenue, meaning that the UK top 20 law firm required greater structure around how they deliver projects.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider about her recent career history, Wakenell said: “I supported them in getting that governance in place for projects and set up a high-performing team of experts and delivery resources for projects and change to help get projects over the line.” She added: “We worked with the business to deliver all sorts of projects, whether that be agile working or redesigning our office space, and also lots of finance projects. We also worked on more general business services transformation.”
In terms of agile working and office logistics, post-Covid, Wakenell helped the firm to get people back into the office and move to an agile working environment, including making the office a more attractive place to be. She was also involved in aspects of Clyde & Co’s merger with BLM, which was the second largest law firm merger in the UK’s history. Wakenell told us: “Clyde & Co had never embarked on something like that and needed to ensure that it was set up in the right way. It was about combining systems but also properly integrating people and it was a huge project. Clyde & Co put a huge amount of energy into make sure they got it right.”
In terms of finance projects, Wakenell helped to set up a greenfield procurement function and was involved in a new business intake project, which is where she worked with the Alt-V team, bringing the consultancy in to help reduce the time it takes to accept client instructions. She was also involved in Clyde & Co’s massive project to move to Elite 3E in the cloud, led by head of IT strategy, architecture and design, Jeremy Morris.
Prior to Clyde & Co, Wakenell held finance and operations roles at big four accountant EY, looking after a mixture of projects in EMEA.
The hire comes as Alt-V sees greater need among its clients to build their own change functions, and also help with adopting new technologies, including generative AI.
Wakenell said: “I’m joining Alt-V for lots of reasons but one is that they are trusted in the market and have that deep expertise in legal. I’m not sure I’ve worked with a consultancy that has taken the time to bring new ideas and really innovative stuff to the table. Some of it you might say ‘We’re not ready for that yet!’ but they have innovative and new ideas. They have so much experience and it’s really exciting that I’ll get to work with a variety of different clients and different types of work.”