Foges is looking for candidates with experience of using technology or who have embarked on transformation processes within their work environment
BY:
Alexis de Hahn
Avocat Reporteur
PROJECT COUNSEL MEDIA
15 September 2020 (Paris, France) – Deloitte Legal’s new head of managed services Emily Foges is looking to hire a band of in-house lawyers to boost her nascent unit within the legal arm of the Big Four accountancy firm. The following is a summary of her lengthy interview with “The Lawyer” which is behind “The Lawyer” pay wall.
Foges took on the leadership function in June, concluding a four-year stint as CEO of artificial intelligence company Luminance. As part of her role, she has concocted a plan around a string of new services that will combine managed services capabilities with the advice of the accountancy firm’s expanding lawyer ranks. She has responsibility over the UK, Europe and the Middle East.
The plan comes as the new team has already struck a contract with a manufacturing company, less than four months after the debut of the managed services offering. Foges could not disclose the name of the client, but said it is an existing Deloitte relationship.
The early part of the strategy will involve an extensive hiring process to recruit what is understood to be around 60 lawyers by the end of the current financial year. Some of them have already joined from the in-house teams of companies across a number of sectors, as well as from private practice in some cases.
This growing headcount will support clients as they seek to improve their operations and take away grudge work such as contracting processes. Foges is looking for candidates with experience of using technology or who have embarked on transformation processes within their work environment:
“General counsel and legal departments are finding themselves caught between a rock and a hard place: they have to deliver more with fewer resources. We want to help in-house lawyers move away from time-consuming, routine legal work so they can focus on the high value, strategic advice they went into the job to deliver.
At the same time we can introduce new technology, process improvement, insights from data and operational effectiveness to increase the value they deliver back to the business”.
This is a selling point designed to counteract clients’ urges to outsource this kind of work to external businesses, which often prompts more supervision work by third parties.
It is not the first time Foges has embarked on a selling journey. During her tenure at Luminance, Foges grew the business from a team of four in Cambridge to a 100-strong London-headquartered company with outposts in New York, Chicago and Singapore. In the meantime, she struck contracts with 200 firms and in-house teams globally.
Over her time there, she sunk her teeth into corners of the international market, and then reached the top New York and London firms. She found that the biggest impediment to the adoption of new technologies was an excessive focus on the hourly billing model as opposed to the real outcome each firm wanted to achieve for a client.
Foges began talking with Deloitte Legal’s Michael Castle in January 2019, after he took the managing partner role for the fledgling legal branch of Deloitte. The conversations matured into the opportunity for a role that would take Foges away from Luminance after a four-year tenure.
The unit will collaborate closely on the development of technology tools with former Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner’s (BCLP) legal operations director Bruce Braude, who joined as chief technology officer of Deloitte Legal last year alongside Laura Bygrave, who was previously innovation head at Taylor Wessing.
They will aim to develop a series of ad-hoc platforms that can be tailored to help each client design data-led end to end processes to improve their operations. The in-house lawyers within the unit will drive the assessment and adoption of these platforms for clients, with technologists leading on implementation. However, the unit will also make use of third-party technology.
The main platform currently being developed is a ‘legal hub’ used for process improvement projects in in-house legal functions.
Foges’ onboarding process to Deloitte was entirely remote due to the onset of Covid-19, and she has since embarked on a design and promotion journey to show the unit’s potential to partners across the consulting, tax and audit branches of the firm. She wants to tap into talent from each expertise in order to provide clients with a comprehensiveness of service that they wouldn’t get from other standalone managed services competitors.
NOTE: the strategy around managed services comes as Deloitte Legal just announced the hire of Jack Diggle from NewLaw provider Elevate to head its new legal management consulting arm. He will be joining with two more Elevate staff members, including contract management expert Craig Conte and legal management consultant Tom Birdseye.
Elevate had its own news last week when it announced it had postponed its initial public offering due to disruption brought about by the pandemic. The IPO was highly anticipated in the legal technology industry as a metric in the financial health of similar vendors. The global revenue of the provider now stands at $82m. While the company does not break down geographic contribution of each jurisdiction in which it operates, it is estimated that UK grosses well over £20m of the total.
The expansion of Deloitte Legal’s legal managed services and legal management consulting units was at the heart of a three-year strategy set out by leader Michael Castle that set out investment plans until 2023. A version of the plan was first presented to the partnership early in the summer of 2019. That strategy entails developing legal capabilities further by appointing a series of figure heads around specific practices that include:
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- intellectual property
- technology law
- tax litigation
- immigration
- private client, and
- corporate and commercial
In the UK, Deloitte Legal has currently over 85 lawyers and 175 fee-earners; globally, it counts 2700 legal professionals spread across 80 countries.
The move by the Big Four accounting firms into legal services has been well chronicled. And the fact they have been far more successful in enabling the legal function to embrace digital transformation has been an issue for Big Law. Yes, there is a general consensus that technology can make a big difference to the way legal functions work. In some markets, the legal function has been working with technology for some time and it is on the second or third wave of tooling solutions. In others, legal is exploring how technology might be used and which of the many products available on the market is best aligned with their needs.
But with the rise of the new technologies that have been formed with/around AI, the Big Four seem to have appreciated far more quickly the value that technology can play in legal operations.
COVID-19 has accelerated this process, but Big Law is not being left in the dust.
For instance, in the UK, Eversheds Sutherland is setting out a model long-term comeback strategy that will see the firm direct investments previously devoted to real estate into technology. It is rethinking and analying the long-term future of the office environment and planning to reduce its real estate footprint – shifting investments to high-level technology, overhauling the way staff has worked with technology in order to sustain a more viable and efficient remote work experience.
Such shifts are being made by Big Law in the U.S., as well. Yes, developing a more resilient business model but mindful of the systems and mindsets to support it.
