Lawfront in November announced the appointment of Tony McKenna as its chief information officer – a high-level hire for a now circa £130m revenue UK firm that is already disrupting the law firm model.
Lawfront is backed by private equity company Blixt Group, and its strategy is to buy leading regional law firms in order, in short, to free them from the constraints of the partnership model and help them run efficiently from all perspectives. What’s different to other consolidators such as Knights is that firms continue to run under their own name and brand. The firms currently under the Lawfront umbrella are Brachers, Farleys, Fisher Jones Greenwood, Nelsons, Slater Heelis and Trethowans.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, McKenna said: “The ownership model really attracted me but combined with the maintenance of the culture of the individual firms and the brand of the individual firms. That for me was the best of all the worlds type of approach to how we deliver best services to our clients.
“Having worked in PLCs and organisations long before I joined law, I’ve always thought that the partnership model is at odds with the efficient delivery of quality service, if I’m honest. So, when I was approached and started to talk to the guys here, it just felt like a nice fit.”
At the core of the Lawfront proposition is a shared IT stack and operations model: sharedo for case, matter and workflow together with NetDocuments for document management, Intapp for time keeping and Aderant for practice management.
While currently Lawfront still has six different platforms, the ambition is that by the end of 2026, they will all have migrated onto the Lawfront technology platform. As further firms are acquired, the hope is that the new arrivals will be migrated in fairly short order to the core platform.
These are big ambitions, but this isn’t the Lawfront team’s first rodeo. Prior to Howard Kennedy, McKenna also worked for Gowling WLG and magic circle firms Freshfields and A&O Shearman. Lawfront’s CEO Neil Lloyd has specialised for over 20 years in growing businesses and COO Axel Koelsch has held that role as firms including Linklaters, Hogan Lovells, Freshfields, Addleshaw Goddard and Stephenson Harwood. Helping member firms to drive innovation and AI is James Grice, who joined from Eversheds Sutherland a year ago.
While the tech stack is quite standard on the face of it, the plan is that leveraging sharedo in conjunction with the other systems will create efficiencies that have previously eluded the majority of firms – work will be time stamped and time will, eventually, be recorded passively.
“A lot of people are talking about sharedo as a case management product,” says McKenna. “It’s not. Sharedo is just an exceptional workflow tool and allows us the ability to build workflows that map to best practice across six different firms. So – and this is where I see the massive advantage – sharedo will then timestamp the work that you’re doing and that will be passed automatically into our time recording platform.”
First thing’s first, one of the Lawfront businesses will go live on the Lawfront platform in February, with others following throughout the course of the year. Lawfront is using Databricks for data management and McKenna says: “From there we’ll be manipulating the data and leveraging it back to colleagues.”
Better and more consolidated data will ultimately benefit front end technologies such as GenAI legal assistant Jylo – a core platform for Lawfront through which it is building playbooks.
It also throws up the potential to create a natural language UI and McKenna says: “You asked me a question earlier about what’s the big thing for 2026 and wouldn’t it be wild if we could have natural language interrogation of all of our data?”
It will be interesting to see how far Lawfront gets next year. McKenna says: “Neil and Axel have done an incredible job, and all the guys here have. I’m lucky to be coming in at this now, where I can help shape this next stage.”
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