Deloitte Legal hired legal tech trainer and consultant Catherine Bamford to lead its legal engineering efforts, as part of a spate of top hires made this year.
Bamford, who begins in the role early next year, will help clients find legal tech solutions and will advise Deloitte Legal’s in-house attorneys on how to improve their document review and knowledge engineering capabilities.
Bamford has been running BamLegal, a London-based automation consultancy to both law firms and corporate legal teams, since 2014. Before then, she was a senior legal knowledge engineer with the law firm Pinsent Masons.
“I have spent the last ten years helping the legal sector implement and scale their use of legal technology,” Bamford said in a statement. “In today’s legal market, those that don’t capitalize on process optimization and technology are at risk of losing out to more switched-on competitors.”
General counsel and in-house legal teams are regularly looking to make every day types of tasks more efficient, noted Michael Castle, the U.K. managing partner for legal. Bamford’s knowledge of legal engineering will add to “our legal and consulting expertise, as well as our deep understanding of the latest technology in the legal sector,” he said.
The appointment follows the July hires of new Deloitte Legal Chief Tech Officer Bruce Braude, and Laura Bygrave, its new innovation lead. Collectively, the team is looking to add to Deloitte Legal’s proprietary legal technology. This includes dTrax, an artificial intelligence-enabled contract management tool, according to a Deloitte statement, and myInsight, a portal that allows clients to track compliance obligations.
