Syncly has hired Rishit Patel from Thomson Reuters HighQ as its chief technology officer, we can reveal. The Australian-headquartered legal data integration startup is delivering on its promise to grow its development team, having this summer raised sizeable seed funding from Stuart Barr, former chief product and strategy officer of HighQ.
At Thomson Reuters, Patel latterly served as the vice president of software engineering, managing a team of 300+ people. He joined TR as part of the 2019 acquisition of HighQ, where he had spent 14 years rising up the ranks from developer to director of software development.
Syncly provides customers in the US, UK, EU, and APAC with no-code integrations between the firm’s systems of record, such as iManage and NetDocuments, and systems of collaboration such as HighQ, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. It helps law firms to synchronise and move documents between platforms to ensure that the system of record is complete, and it also provides an audit trail of where documents have been moved from and to.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Syncly’s co-founder and CEO Stewart Rasmussen, who is also ex-HighQ, said that Patel will be in charge of the security architecture of Syncly and continue to build the team. “Rishit understands better than anyone the system of collaboration and the security and compliance needs of those sorts of systems, particularly around how clients are provisioned access to sensitive data,” he observed.
Patel is based in the UK and Rasmussen added: “His hire allows us to grow our team in a region where many of our customers are. We have a big focus on the UK, Europe and the US.”
Patel told Legal IT Insider: “I have an opportunity to build and scale the business and I’m looking forward to working with the core HighQ team again.”
As we first revealed in August, Barr this summer became a significant shareholder in Syncly and joined the board as an investor director after investing “hundreds of thousands of pounds”. Talking about Patel’s hire, he told Legal IT Insider: “Of the three of us, Rishit joined HighQ first. He has grown up with the company, starting as a developer, then senior developer, then taking ownership of the HighQ product, and then senior director of engineering. He moved to the UK in 2017 after spending a long time in India evolving as a leader. When we were acquired by Thomson Reuters, he became VP of engineering and had to integrate HighQ’s technology into TR’s.
“He has seen technology scale and all the problems that comes with it. He knows how to run a big software team and about hiring; security and compliance; scaling; migrating to Azure and so much that is relevant. HighQ is one of the platforms we integrate with but there are many others and Rishit is very familiar with working with APIs. There are so many boxes he ticks with his skillset.”
Syncly is already hiring a team around Patel, with a particular focus on the Northern Hemisphere.
Rasmussen said: “We’re building a business of like-minded people. We want a high performing team of passionate people. Rishit is a well-rounded person who can lead people and build world class software.”
caroline@legaltechnology.com