ALSP/Law company Elevate today announced that Brian Kuhn – Founder and global leader of IBM Watson’s legal consulting practice – has joined the company as Vice President of its new Digital Strategy and Solutions business unit.
The unit will be focused on helping law departments and law firms capitalise on digital technologies and related best practices. Kuhn will report to Liam Brown, Elevate’s Chairman and CEO.
Kuhn is well-known in legal tech circles and has long been a cheerleader for disruptive change in the sector. A top presenter at conferences and business developer for IBM Watson, Kuhn is clearly one of the biggest hires the law company has made since they brought in Dan Katz, of LexPredict.
Kuhn said: ‘The convergence of disruptive digital technologies — artificial intelligence, machine learning, the cloud, and blockchain — has created unprecedented opportunities for law departments and law firms to solve previously unaddressable business problems.
‘Elevate has assembled a team of legal technologists, engineers, and consultants who design and build custom digital solutions. For example, while traditional analytic tools crunch the numbers of outside counsel spend; by applying AI, we analyze legal language and surface the root causes behind attorney spend. One of our first digital solutions analyzes the context and terminology used by lawyers to scale ‘human-quality’ spend and performance review, radically reducing costs and surfacing actionable insights that drive more strategic case management decision-making.’
Kuhn added in a comment to Artificial Lawyer: ‘It’s a pleasure and an honour to be a member of the Elevate team. I look forward to serving the legal industry by leading our new Digital Strategy & Solutions business, which draws upon Elevate’s phenomenal technical, consulting, and services capabilities to help customers identify and execute on the best use of technology to achieve customer-specific business objectives.’
Elevate boss, Brown, added: ‘With Brian leading our new Digital Strategy and Solutions practice, we will help our customers thrive in the coming wave of digitisation.’
The move is yet another expansionary step for Elevate, which continues to grow both organically and via a series of takeovers of related businesses in the tech, legal process and on-demand lawyer areas. They have also been keen to hire individual talent.
In December 2019 they also hired Simon Heyrick to be their CFO – seen as a key step ahead of further funding, or possibly a public listing.