UK-founded law firm client lifecycle and client intelligence platform Legl has announced a trio of senior hires to strengthen its leadership team across growth, international expansion and engineering.
The appointments are Lauren Watson, formerly EVP of business operations at Robin AI, who returns to Legl to lead growth, brand and partnerships; Robbie Goldberg, formerly commercial leader at Datadog, who joins to lead Legl’s Australian operations; and Richard Hill, previously engineering leader at ThoughtRiver, who further expands Legl’s engineering capability.
Watson was one of Legl’s earliest employees and played a central role in building the company’s brand, go-to-market strategy and early partnerships. She previously worked with Legl’s founder and CEO Julia Salasky at CrowdJustice, which Salasky was also the founder of. Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Salasky said: “We often hire from outside of the legal industry and always try to hire the best people. The reason I hired Lauren is because she is quite honestly one of the best people I have ever worked with and she has the best understanding of the legal sector.”
In her new role, Watson will be responsible for scaling Legl’s growth in the UK and Australia through marketing, brand and strategic partnerships.
Legl now has 500 law firm clients, of which around 40 are in the UK top 200. Watson’s role will be to support the company’s continued expansion among mid-market and Top 200 firms in the UK and internationally.
Watson told us: “I left Legl as it was just getting off the ground and it has become a rocket ship. It’s nice to come back and have 500 customers.”
Goldberg, meanwhile, is based in Sydney and joins Legl during a time in which regulatory changes have accelerated technology adoption in the AML/CTF space. At Datadoghe ran a high-growth commercial function for the hyper-scaling technology company.
Australia represents a key growth opportunity for Legl, with increasing regulatory complexity and growing demand from law firms for technology that connects client onboarding, compliance and financial workflows.
Legl already has a team of three under Goldberg, with more hires in the pipeline. Salasky told us: “Australia is a very tech-forward jurisdiction and we see a lot of the same vendor partners there – for example ActionStep, Clio and NetDocuments – so there are a lot of synergies in terms of our technology partnership and ways of working.”
She added: “Regulation is an interesting driver of client experience. When you have a regulatory burden, you have to think about client experience management. It’s a big opportunity to think about client lifecycle management in a way that people haven’t to date, and it’s a quite a greenfield space.”
Last but not least, Richard Hill joins a mature engineering function led by CTO Matt Jared, to add deep experience building legal technology platforms. Hill will play a key role in accelerating development as Legl continues to invest in client intelligence, automation and data-driven workflows.
Salasky said: “We have a great engineering leadership already but we brought Richard in to help us think more strategically about how we develop our own processes and also how we work internally from a product engineering perspective that will help us deliver to our customers more quickly.”
Jared added: “We see huge opportunities not only for continuing to accelerate the intelligence layer we are delivering to our customers, but also to accelerate our own business processes through innovation in technology. Richard’s experience will help us continue to expand our ability to deliver value to our customers and innovate at pace.”
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