While it’s been a long tradition for law firms to send junior associates to clients as part of ‘value added’ deals that help to build goodwill, Slaughter and May has now seconded one of its first Legal Operations Executives to its client, Diageo. This follows the launch of the firm’s two-year Legal Operations Training Programme.
Slaughter and May has been working alongside Diageo in a number of areas, such as knowledge, technology and systems, and responsible business, the firm said. Diageo is also a part of the firm’s Client Innovation Network, which acts as ‘a forum for members of in-house legal and legal operations teams to share ideas and experiences within the innovation and legal tech space, as well as test new technologies in collaboration with the firm’.
All three Legal Operations Executives taking part in the programme will receive a similar experience, ‘ensuring that they each have exposure to life on the other side of the law firm/client relationship’ the leading UK law firm added.
The two-year Training Programme sees three graduates rotate around various Business Services departments at the firm including Knowledge, Innovation, Technology, Business Intelligence & Pricing and Legal Project Management. The two years are supplemented not only by a client secondment, but also by a one month external training course.
Janet Morrison, Head of Legal Operations at Diageo said: ‘We are very excited to welcome one of the Legal Operations Executives into our team. We see the Legal Operations Training Programme as a fantastic opportunity for us to continue collaborating with Slaughter and May. It also forms part of our commitment to promoting and developing Legal Operations as a discipline; we believe Diageo is the first UK in-house legal team to offer such a secondment.
‘By working with us, the Slaughter and May Legal Operations Executive will be exposed to a wide range of projects, spanning diversity and inclusion, knowledge management, technology and more, all from the client perspective.’
Alex Woods, Director of Knowledge and Innovation at Slaughter and May said: ‘A client secondment is an invaluable opportunity for our Legal Operations Executives to see the unique challenges that corporate legal operations teams face. We would welcome any of our clients who might be interested in being involved in the programme to get in touch and we’d be happy to discuss.
‘The client journey is a hugely important part of what we do and we want our Execs to learn from our own legal operations teams as well as those at our clients.’