Developing a more resilient business model. And developing the systems and mindsets to support it.
20 May 2020 (Brussels, BE) – Deloitte Legal has snagged Luminance chief executive officer Emily Foges to lead its managed services business. She’ll take on the leadership function in June, concluding a four-year stint as CEO of the artificial intelligence company. As part of her role, she will concoct a string of new services that will combine managed services capabilities with the advice of the accountancy firm’s expanding lawyer ranks. She will have responsibility over the UK, Europe and the Middle East.
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 250 firms and in-house teams globally. Before joining Luminance, Foges was product development director at Equifax, having previously held commercial and strategic roles at BT and Betfair and in retail companies.
Luminance was founded by three PhD mathematicians from the University of Cambridge and has become the market-leading AI platform for the legal industry. Trained by legal experts, Luminance’s technology is founded on computer vision and machine learning. The genesis of the company focused on solving the problem of how a machine could read, learn and understand language. Foges was brought in after seed funding to raise awareness and sell the product. Upon starting at the company she said it was “a greenfield opportunity, working with a new technology specific to the legal industry”. Her first aim was to start looking for a beta customer, which the company found in Slaughter and May. She said:
They had a deliberate strategy not to become a huge law firm, but focus on quality over quantity. It was a true partnership.
Slaughter and May adopted Luminance’s solution and drove the initiative in 2016. Both companies worked side-by-side on an M&A transaction. During the course of the pilot two teams were measured by the speed at which they could work and uncover issues in the transaction. The team using Luminance worked twice as fast and found issues that the other team didn’t pick up. Following the clear success of the solution, the desire was to amass more clients. And, that’s exactly what Luminance did; from three customers in 2016 and 80 by the end of 2017, the company now has just under 250 customers. “We hit the market at the right time with the right technology,” she said.
Artificial intelligence in the legal industry .. adoption, strategy, implementation … is now well trod ground. You only need to follow Jonathan Maas’ well-read weekly BONG! newsletter to see the flood of analysis, and to keep up. But as Foges said in a recent webinar:
Implementing our technology requires a pincer movement from the top and IT department. The partner at the law firm drive everything, but central IT and the knowledge function also need to be involved in the technology’s rollout. With smaller firms it’s much easier to get buy-in, but the bigger the firm the more complex it is.
This past year at Legaltech 2020, after following Luminance over the past four years, it was interesting to see how Luminance’s solution has become refined. Across the free two week pilot it offers potential customers, the company guarantees it will help improve workflow twice as fast. But, because it’s a machine learning solution, the more data it consumes and the longer it operates, the better the algorithm will work, the better it will be able to understand the nuance of legal language. As Foges has said:
The fundamental role of the platform is to find anomalies. It could replace paralegals trawling through documents, but it won’t replace legal thinking.
Michael Castle, managing partner for the UK and North/South European arms of Deloitte Legal, said in a formal statement:
Emily is a proven leader and business builder with more than 20 years’ experience developing and growing technology-led businesses for well-known brands. Emily has a wealth of knowledge about how to transform the ways in which lawyers work and the ways in which legal services are delivered. This combination of experience and knowledge will be instrumental as we take our legal managed services offering to the next level.
He added that the hire will help deal with client requests as in-house teams find themselves facing the disruption brought about by Covid-19 on their businesses.
Talking about her new function, Foges said:
I have always recognised the value in collaborating with experts with a range of skillsets in order to solve complex problems. Deloitte’s multidisciplinary offering, spanning the professional services spectrum, is a key differentiator for unlocking efficiency bottlenecks for legal functions. This will enable teams to focus on more strategic issues, reducing operational risks and removing constraints to business growth.
And in an interesting side note, alongside Foges, the firm has also hired EY Riverview Law managed services head Sonia Williamson as a director, with responsibility over contract management. Williamson helped build the rival’s managed services function after the acquisition of Riverview Law by EY in 2018. Deloitte Legal’s UK headcount currently includes 250 people, of whom 85 are lawyers.
Luminance moved swiftly, announcing that US chief Jason Brennan will become acting CEO of the company after Foges’ departure. He will focus on expanding the business in the United States, as well as consolidating its position in Europe and APAC. Foges will be joining Luminance’s European advisory board.
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.
In the UK, Eversheds Sutherland is probably 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, and will be the subject of a separate post. Yes, developing a more resilient business model but mindful of the systems and mindsets to support it.
