Jameson Legal has appointed serial investor and strategic adviser Dan Wales to lead its legal tech consultancy arm and hired Sophie Best as a senior legal tech consultant working between the Middle East and Europe, we can reveal.
Founded by Jeremy Small, Jameson Legal are global recruitment specialists that launched a legal tech arm, Jameson Legal Tech (JLT), in 2020. Wales and Best are taking over the reins from former JLT head Jon Bartman, and head of client services Anthony Cherchian, who were instrumental in the launch of JLT in 2020. Bartman posted on LinkedIn on 10 September that he is on gardening leave, while Cherchian is helping with the handover.
JLT, which has been compared with the likes of LexFusion and Reynen Court, helps to connect in-house and private practice buyers with the right legal tech solutions, while its recruitment business helps fill technology and sales roles within law firms, legal software vendors, consultancies and technology startups. A practice management system data extraction service sees it help organisations moving away from a legacy system or upgrade an existing system to the cloud.
The London-headquartered company announced a year ago that Wales had joined as a consultant legal tech expert, and speaking to Legal IT Insider about this latest news, global head of JLT recruitment, Darren Kantor, said: “Dan is working with legal tech vendors, helping with their go-to-market strategy and introducing them to Jameson Legal law firm and corporate legal clients. Then you have as part of that strategy some of our clients wanting us to work as acting CRO.”
Since selling his business DW Reporting to BigHand in 2018, Wales has invested and helped lead multiple companies including, most recently, client intelligence platform Orgaimi, where he is head of growth.
Best, meanwhile, brings over 18 years of global legal tech experience and has held roles including director of business development at TransPerfect; senior director of BD at ContractPodAi; and director Middle East of Donnelley Financial Solutions, helping companies to navigate the due diligence and litigation process. She is chapter assistant director at Women in eDiscovery Dubai.
Kantor said: “Sophie’s role is a key part of the growth strategy for the company, working with clients and managing existing relationships as well as bringing new ones in. She’ll be helping to introduce the technology that we work with to our client base, including law firms, GCs and corporate legal departments. She has a really good background in legal tech and for the past year has been working as an independent legal consultant but is now consulting as part of our organisation.”
JLT has created a portfolio of 10 different, non-competing clients from across the technology lifecycle including KLDiscovery, Henchman, StructureFlow, Kudocs, Precise, Dealcloser, Version Story, BRYTER, LinkSquares, and Everchron.