Factor has hired Ed Sohn from Big Four group, EY Law, to be the process cruncher’s Head of Solutions.
The move follows the recent hires of a new CFO, John Dillon, the former divisional CFO of global consulting firm Mercer, and Roxann Erxleben, who is the company’s new COO, and who was formerly at Accenture, and also Axiom – which Factor was once part of.
Sohn’s CV includes stints as a lawyer at King & Spalding; handling litigation matters at the then Pangea3 – where he started in 2012; then he was at Thomson Reuters in the Legal Managed Services group after the legal publishing giant bought Pangea3. This group was then sold to EY Law last year. At EY he has worked as Managing Director, Global Innovation & Technology Leader.
In effect Sohn has moved through three iterations of the same business, from 2012 to 2020, before joining Factor, and has picked up a ton of experience related to process management along the way.
The recent hires also underline the group’s serious intention to capture more of the process-crunching market. For example, they recently won a mandate to work with Allen & Overy on a multi-party offering to help with the massive IBOR/LIBOR demands that banks are now experiencing.
And, as explained in this AL interview with Varun Mehta, who joined as CEO in January, the goal is to ‘own complex work at scale’, i.e. to understand the processes within such work, e.g. LIBOR/IBOR repapering, then build the protocols and put together the teams and tech needed to run that exercise efficiently and at scale. As Mehta explained in the interview, tech is part of this, but they are also heavily focused on the better leverage of human talent.
Mehta added in a statement: ‘We are thrilled to welcome Ed to Factor as we continue to assemble a top leadership team that embodies our culture as we aim to be the industry’s leading New Law company.
‘As large enterprises and legal departments navigate massive new burdens related to the COVID crisis—particularly in contracting—the need for meaningful innovation and advanced technology has never been greater and the stakes have never been higher. Ed is uniquely grounded in product management for the legal services and technology space, and he has the vision and passion to take our company and our clients to the next level.’
Sohn (pictured above) concluded: ‘Factor maintains the entrepreneurship and inventiveness of a fast-growing startup while also possessing the trust of an elite client base over proven multi-year relationships. I am ready – and our clients are ready, and the market is ready – to help co-develop Factor’s next generation of scaled, tech-enabled service offerings.’
And….if all of this sparks your interest then check out the piece from earlier this morning in Artificial Lawyer. This is what is happening now:
An End to the Traditional US Law Firm Monopoly
TL/DR: The future is going to be heavily influenced by those firms that either build their own or work closely with process-focused LSBs.