Kalexius was given its first ranking by Chambers and Partners in May this year, when it was recognised as a top ALSP. We speak to Willson and legal operations specialist Stella Peterson.
BT’s former head of legal vendor management, Neil Willson, has joined global managed legal service provider Kalexius as head of consulting, we can reveal. Willson, who ran BT’s most recent panel selection under which the telecoms company cut its panel law firms from 40 to 15, is based in the UK and will help Kalexius grow its UK presence.
Kalexius is headquartered in Geneva and currently serves clients in Europe, the United States and the GCC countries from offices in five countries: Switzerland, New York, France, the UK (where it has a small office in Holborn) and an offshore centre in Mauritius. Founded in 2011 by managing director Nicolas Leroux, Kalexius has around eighty staff and focuses on employing permanent teams of lawyers, consultants and project managers across its locations. It was given its first ranking by Chambers and Partners in May this year, when it was recognised as a top ALSP.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Willson said: “Kalexius are very much a mix between qualified lawyers and lower cost resource depending on what the client needs and they have the ability to bespoke the offering to the clients’ needs as appropriate.
“My role is head of consulting and effectively I’m doing service design and some sales on the client side. I’m ‘game keeper turned poacher’ and my hope is that I have some credibility as a result. I know what the competition is and can say from first hand experience ‘these are the things we need to get right.’”
Speaking to Chambers in May, Leroux said: “We are in a unique position to bridge the gap in the legal market between traditional law firms and legal staffing agencies. We allow our clients to focus on their core remit while relying on Kalexius’ expertise and efficiency for volume-intensive tasks. We take on large-scale projects and regular workflows to support major financial institutions and other multinationals faced with an increasingly complex regulatory environment and headcount pressure.”
Kalexius supports major banks, asset managers and insurance companies on BAU work and projects including large repapering exercises. It combines senior legal expertise with offshore delivery capabilities and technology, in a combined ‘people, process, technology’ offering.
Its technology stack is very much based around Microsoft Office 365 and speaking to Legal IT Insider Stella Peterson, legal operations specialist at Kalexius said: “In terms of our general IT framework, we’re very down to earth and very much for Office 365. We’ve used Teams for many years and we leverage a lot of the other applications such as Bookings, Power BI, and Flow and that helps us to get through 70% of our client needs. Most of the time we can deliver the best quality and price through Office 365 because we’re trying to find the simplest interface and it’s often the same technology as our clients are using.”
The other non-Microsoft tool that is a core part of Kalexius’ tech stack is project management application Wrike. Peterson said: “All the legal work we do is centralised in Wrike. Even with the basic subscription you can customise Wrike and fit it to your legal workflow. We like Wrike because we get to customise it a lot and we make it better and better as time goes by.”
Every piece of work done by Kalexius is represented as a task in Wrike, including the documents, who is working on them (you can collaborate with the client in Wrike) and emails. Peterson says: “If anyone wants to know what happens one year later it’s all there.” She adds: “We do a great diversity of legal work and everything in there gives us data and we have all the data on everything we’ve been doing since the beginning.”