Alistair Maiden, who created the well-known legal engineering group Syke before selling it to Consilio, has joined legal agent maker Flank in a senior role. His exact title is yet to be finalised.
Maiden was also previously an inhouse lawyer and after the sale to Consilio in 2023 had a stint there. But since leaving he has had the time and plenty of resources to explore new opportunities.
He commented: ‘I spent the last few years at Consilio, looking hard at how corporate legal teams can use AI to do more for less, and I took a close look at the market-leading legal AI tools.
‘There are now countless ways to automate legal work. Few are ready for the enterprise. Flank’s agents are reliable, straightforward to implement, and built to scale. Its capability and its vision stood out.’
Meanwhile, Lili Breidenbach, CEO and co-founder of Flank, added: ‘Alistair has spent a decade delivering on legal outcomes, first by building the technology and then by deploying it alongside the teams who depend on it. He knows the difference between a tool that demos well and a system an enterprise legal team will actually trust with its work. That is precisely the judgement we want as we scale the service. We are glad to have him.’
By chance, AL’s founder met Maiden in the lobby of a famous London law firm yesterday afternoon, (see pic below).
So, is this a big deal? Well, Maiden probably doesn’t need to work too much after selling to Consilio, but his experience of legal tech implementations will be very useful to Flank. His contacts and reputation in this field will also help Flank win more clients and also support other future strategic moves.
It’s interesting timing as well, given the move of Summize to buy part of InnoLaw, a legal tech consultancy. As mentioned earlier by AL, bringing in FDE capabilities underlines the potential for more meaningful AI – and agentic – roll-outs within companies. And Maiden has a lot of experience working on such projects, even if the agent bit was perhaps not part of what the former Syke group was handling.
And as to Flank, here’s how they describe what they do and how Maiden will help with this: ‘In most legal departments, inexpensive, repeatable work still runs through the most expensive people in the building.
‘Flank’s agents pick up requests by email, execute the work end to end, and route finished output to a supervision inbox for legal sign-off. Lawyers supervise. The agents do the execution. It is the same result Maiden spent his career delivering by hand at Syke, now produced by agents and at scale, under the team’s own playbooks and chosen level of oversight.’
And they concluded: ‘Most of the legal AI market sells tools that make lawyers faster at the work they already do. It rarely changes what the work costs, because making an expensive resource quicker at inexpensive work does not move the economics of the department. Maiden built one of the most respected names in the business by refusing that trade and delivering outcomes instead. Flank is the engine that delivers them by default.’
Congrats to all involved!
More about Flank here.
Discover more from Artificial Lawyer
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.