Targeting 50 clients by year end: DLA Piper develops e-learning tool in quality drive and to sell

Not wanting to be outdone by their US colleagues, who recently launched DLA Piper’s first non-legal entity selling cybersecurity software subscriptions for $25,000 a year, the firm’s London office is preparing to rollout an e-learning product for both associates and clients.

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Bringing lawyers and consultants ‘under the same roof’: Eversheds launches financial services consulting arm

Eversheds has expanded its consulting services business, Eversheds Consulting, with the launch of a financial services regulatory compliance offering, and recruited six senior consultants and a team of compliance contractors, including Jean-Paul Simoes and Jonathan Steward from EY and KPMG respectively.

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‘Willingness to do things differently’: RPC to try hand at management consultancy

RPC is set to launch a new management consultancy business to target its core insurance sector clients, and has hired Rory O’Brien, the former global head of risk consulting and software at Towers Watson, to spearhead the venture.

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Lawyers on tap: Addleshaw Goddard to establish flexible resourcing capability

Addleshaw Goddard (AG) is looking to establish a flexible resourcing capability by creating a pool of qualified lawyers and paralegals to backfill gaps in services left by lawyers seconded to clients or where extra capacity is needed for discrete assignments.

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Addleshaw Goddard to establish flexible resourcing capability after strategy revamp

Addleshaw Goddard (AG) is looking to establish a flexible resourcing capability by creating a pool of qualified lawyers and paralegals to backfill gaps in services left by lawyers seconded to clients or where extra capacity is needed for discrete assignments.

The firm has already spoken to recruiters about setting up a roster of flexible workers and may expand its use in the future. It is understood that the new flexible resourcing will form part of the client development centre (CDC) headed up by key clients senior manager Greg Bott, although after an initial pilot, progress is still in the early stages. The model is seen as a first step to potentially offering a flexi-working service to clients, similar to those offered by Berwin Leighton Paisner’s Lawyers On Demand (LOD) and Pinsent Masons’ Vario network. A spokesperson for the firm added: ‘This is just one of many initiatives that we are looking at to improve our agility and operational effectiveness.’

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Innovation: a driving force in reshaping the legal sector

Baker Tilly’s George Bull sets the scene for change.

Visiting clients in Chicago a few years ago, I saw in bright lights the title of a show at one of the city’s theatres: The Male Intellect: an oxymoron? When I returned to the UK, my wife had only one question: ‘Why the question mark?’

So it is with innovation and law firms. With management teams and advisers alike, urging firms to innovate to succeed, even to innovate to survive, Axiom Law in its latest advertisement simply observes: ‘Innovative lawyers. No longer an oxymoron.’

This demonstrates how far the legal service sector has come. What some have seen as the perfect storm of regulatory reform, financial uncertainty and client demands is being embraced by other legal service providers as the perfect laboratory for innovation and change.

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Guest post: Watson, I presume? (or how I learned to stop worrying and love disruption in law)

I’m often asked – on a panel last month in Europe and on a panel later this month right here in New York at the Law Firm COO & CFO Forum, for example – what I think about ‘disruption’ in the legal industry.

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