Australian-founded document verification software company Atticus has hired Sam Spivack and James Quaile from Bryter to accelerate its growth in the UK and Europe, as well as in the corporate legal space. They join Atticus’s general manager for the UK and Europe, Patrick Skinner, who joined from Bryter in February last year. Spivack and Skinner previously worked together at Kira Systems.
Atticus helps law firms and corporate legal teams to fact check official documents such as prospectuses, verifying that the claims made within are true. It is traditionally used in the corporate and banking sectors but is seeing growing interest from non-transactional departments such as litigation, where it can be used to verify or fact checking pleadings.
Spivack joined the Atticus UK team as a growth consultant on 16 October after a four-year stint as managing director at Bryter. He will be assisting Atticus with the next stage of its growth, working with existing customers, new prospects, new use cases, and, as of next year, will also be looking towards the US market. Atticus’s key markets are APAC (Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore); the UK and Ireland; and the Nordics. While Spivack will be focusing on growth in those regions, Atticus has a number of dual listed corporate customers, and growth in the US is also in its sights.
Quaile joined the Atticus team eight weeks ago, after over three years at Bryter, where he managed the technical pre-sales team and relationships with legal service providers.
He will focus on generating further growth from the corporate legal market among main market and AIM listed companies. While Atticus started out as a law firm tool, it has seen significant adoption by corporate legal teams. New corporate customers within the last six months include John Lewis, and within the last year, Kingfisher and Rentokil.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Skinner said: “We started out focusing on law firms but when they invited their clients to use Atticus, the clients have said ‘we should definitely use this ourselves.’ There has been organic growth and where a company is about to list, they will use Atticus on their internal documents.”
Atticus intrinsically links statements in a document to the source and Skinner said: “One of the reasons for creating Atticus is because this work is mundane for associates and a bit of a loss leader. It is also really prone to mistakes. As corporate teams wise up, they cap the amount they’ll pay, and any time spent over and above that eats into profits.”
The work done can also be revisited and used again if there is a regulatory investigation or a follow up listing. Skinner said: “The corporate space is under so much scrutiny in terms of what a public company discloses, and they really need to get things right.”
Atticus’s law firm customers include Clifford Chance, Bird & Bird, and Burges Salmon, Linklaters, Slaughter and May, and Pinsent Masons.
caroline@legaltechnology.com