Press releases

Deloitte Legal strengthens Legal Managed Services with strategic partner hire and contract management team expansion

20 May 2020

Deloitte Legal has today announced the appointment of Emily Foges as lead partner for its Legal Managed Services (LMS) business, working with clients in the UK and across Europe and the Middle East.

Emily is joining the team to expand Deloitte Legal’s existing LMS capabilities, and, in addition, to build out a new portfolio of services that are not yet widely available in the market. Emily will combine Deloitte’s managed services experience with Deloitte Legal’s rapidly-growing legal advisory capabilities to develop services that target specific business needs for efficiency and quality.

Emily will join Deloitte Legal in June after four years as CEO of Luminance Technologies, an artificial intelligence platform for the legal profession. In this role, Emily excelled in building a service to the legal sector, overseeing the implementation of legal technology to more than 200 law firms and in-house teams across 40 countries. Prior to this, she also led complex strategic change and technical integration programmes for Equifax and Betfair, as well as M&A consulting and product development across the retail sector.

Michael Castle, managing partner for Deloitte Legal in the UK & North South Europe commented: “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. Her desire to create new services that the market has never seen before goes hand-in-hand with Deloitte Legal’s ambition to provide clients with new solutions to legal problems.

The legal market has been under pressure to do ‘more for less’ for some time now. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbates this challenge with legal functions having to resolve unprecedented, complex problems in short timeframes, whilst at the same time becoming more efficient.”

Emily Foges, incoming lead partner for legal managed services at Deloitte Legal said: “Legal teams are under immense pressure to deliver more with fewer resources.

One example is the sheer volume of corporate and personal data, which is now so vast that normally routine tasks, such as document review, have become too labour-intensive and onerous for time-constrained, high-skilled legal practitioners.

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.”

In addition to Emily’s appointment, Deloitte Legal is also expanding its Legal Managed Services team with the appointment of Sonia Williamson as a director, leading on contract management.

Qualifying as a solicitor with Eversheds in 2002, Sonia then moved in-house and from 2008 was General Counsel (GC) for TalkTalk Technology. In 2014, Sonia joined Riverview Law, the alternative legal service provider, where she rose to Head of Managed Services and Projects, continuing in that role after Riverview’s acquisition by EY in 2018. During this time, she optimised the contract management process and successfully provided clients with high quality, easy-to-adopt solutions, supporting global customers across numerous industries, from financial services, to telecoms, the pharmaceutical and retail sectors.

An experienced lawyer, Sonia’s role at Deloitte Legal is to build and lead the practice’s Contract Management capability, helping clients outsource day-to-day contract management with a specific focus on commercial, corporate, employment and real estate contracts. Sonia‘s team will help clients manage their day-to-day contracting requirements as an extension of the in-house legal team. She will also support Deloitte’s existing business which has a strong track record of helping clients navigate regulatory challenges through large-scale remediation support, as well as deploying scalable technology such as dTrax, an award-winning, proprietary contract management tool.

Sonia Williamson, legal managed services director at Deloitte Legal, commented: “Deloitte Legal is a fantastic team with a passion to deliver outstanding services in the field of alternative legal services. I’m looking forward to helping clients transform their ways of working with the support of our Legal Managed Service and associated legal technology solutions.”

Castle added: “Sonia is another key addition to our ambitious Deloitte Legal team and brings with her an excellent blend of experiences, combining time in private practice, first-hand knowledge of the challenges of a GC and a proven track record of building and leading a managed services offering.

Sonia is passionate about improving the delivery of legal outcomes through managed services and supporting her clients to address the challenges they face.”

Deloitte Legal has now grown to more than 250 people in the UK, delivering technology-enabled legal solutions in areas such as employment, litigation, corporate and commercial and immigration, including more than 85 client-facing practicing lawyers.

End

Note to editors

About Deloitte Legal
Deloitte Legal means the legal practices of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited member firms or their affiliates that provide legal services. In the UK, Deloitte Legal covers both legal advisory (regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority) and non-SRA regulated legal consulting services. For legal, regulatory and other reasons, not all member firms provide legal services.

About Deloitte
In this press release references to “Deloitte” are references to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (“DTTL”) a UK private company limited by guarantee, and its network of member firms, each of which is a legally separate and independent entity.

Please see deloitte.com/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of DTTL and its member firms.

Deloitte LLP is a subsidiary of Deloitte NWE LLP, which is a member firm of DTTL, and is among the UK's leading professional services firms.

The information contained in this press release is correct at the time of going to press.

For more information, please visit www.deloitte.co.uk

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