First We Take Manhattan: ALSP LOD + Techies SYKE Open In NY

LOD, which provides flexible lawyers and legal managed services, plus its legal tech consulting joint venture partner, SYKE, have formally opened an office in New York. They are now on a major recruitment drive for lawyers, paralegals, legal technologists and operations professionals.

Lewis Bretts, Managing Director, has moved over there from the UK to cement the expansion drive. The new base will include Lewis Davey, LOD Client Solutions Manager, and Trayce Marcelle, a US legal operations and technology specialist. Further staff are due to be announced shortly, the companies promised.

Speaking to Artificial Lawyer, Bretts said: ‘We have had clients in the US for some time and there is growing demand there, but we wanted to wait until we were confident of our delivery capability (for the US) before opening in New York.’

Bretts underlined the effort to hire a range of staff, from American lawyers and paralegals for the service side, to local legal technology experts to help with things like CLM implementation.

He added: ‘We are seeing growing demand among GCs for creative thinking and they are experiencing increasing pressure to manage risk when there is a squeeze on resources.’

Is this a big deal? Legal folks over in the US may not all know LOD and SYKE too well, which formed their partnership in 2021, however in the UK both have a healthy following. Will this impact those offering the same types of services in the US, especially on the East Coast? Possibly, but the cake is getting bigger, both for legal tech/ops consulting and the provision of flexible services, and the New York base is small at present – although who knows how large it can get…?

(And getting some more revenue in US dollars may be nice as well…..given the terrible $/£ exchange rate at the moment…!)

That said, they will be up against plenty of well-known businesses in America that are already established, plus a number of experienced individuals who work in the advisory space.

So, with that in mind who they hire in the coming months will be very interesting and could make a significant difference to how they grow. But, it’s a huge market and it seems very probable that there is more money spent on CLM advisory services and flexible lawyering in the US than anywhere else in the world. Let’s see if the Brits can take Manhattan!

[ Photo: pic of Manhattan taken from Brooklyn’s famously sunny beachfront by RT the last time AL was in New York, March 2022….which feels like a lifetime ago. ]

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