Stuart Barr, the former Chief Product and Strategy Officer for HighQ, has been appointed as a Non-Executive Director (NED) at deal management platform Legatics, in what is his first official role since leaving the Thomson Reuters-owned business this year.
Barr told Artificial Lawyer he will not just be a NED, turning up a couple of days a month for board meetings, but will also leverage his experience at HighQ to provide advice to the company’s sales and product development teams on ‘a tactical level’.
‘I already knew the team there and we got talking around the time of their recent funding round. They are at a great stage now and remind me of where HighQ was back in 2011,’ he said.
‘They have major clients and are growing rapidly. They’ve got great client retention and with the new funding are poised for an exciting stage of further growth. I want to bring what I have learnt at HighQ to them,’ he added.
Barr noted that although HighQ and Legatics are very different types of legal tech company, there were clearly parallels as well, especially in relation to the stage when HighQ really started to grow and where Legatics is now.
At present Legatics is used by Allen & Overy, Hogan Lovells and King and Wood Mallesons, among others.
Barr will join CEO Anthony Seale, CCO Daniel Porus, and recently appointed NED, Joe Krancki, on the Board of Directors. The latter joined as part of the £3m investment from the Mobeus private equity fund. Barr has not invested in the company yet as the most recent funding round is closed, but there may be an opportunity to do so in the future.
Artificial Lawyer had to ask: what’s next? Barr mentioned that he had been in conversation with several other parties, but that he was not likely to announce any other roles for a couple of months, especially as he only left HighQ in March this year.
He added that he was really excited to get started with Legatics, which he saw as a company with a ‘principled approach’ to what they were doing.
‘They are not in this for a quick buck, Anthony [Seale] has a personal mission to improve transaction management,’ he added.
He also reiterated how this reminded him of HighQ: ‘The company started in 2001 and was not sold until 2019. They also didn’t take investment for quite a while.’
Legatics has also been around for some time, launching in 2015, and is now getting to the point of rapid growth.
Seale, the CEO of Legatics, added in a statement: ‘Stuart is a very welcome addition to the Legatics Board. He has both extensive industry knowledge of what works (and what doesn’t) and experience of rapidly scaling a legal technology business. He really understands the journey that Legatics is on and is approaching the role with tremendous passion.’