SYKE has appointed Sarah Barrett-Vane as its Head of Legal Procurement, Spend Management & Ebilling. She joins with immediate effect.
SYKE, which recently celebrated its fourth birthday, has grown rapidly and is now the world’s foremost independent legal tech consultancy, with 90+ engineers based across the globe.
Last week it announced the appointment of Jonny Badrock as Head of Data Services, and officially opened its doors in India with the establishment of a multi–disciplinary centre of excellence headed up by Atul Arora.
Alistair Maiden, SYKE founder and CEO said: “Sarah has an excellent track record of helping legal teams achieve the right blend of in–house resource, external law firm support, and legal tech solutions to handle a diverse workload.
I’m delighted she’s agreed to join the team at SYKE. She’ll head up our legal procurement division with a particular focus on spend management and ebilling. Her experience and know-how will be invaluable for our customers as they seek to optimise their external legal spend in the months and years ahead.”
A former lawyer, Sarah transitioned into legal procurement, then legal operations and legal technology implementation. She was Director of Legal Operations at Royal Mail plc for five years, before moving into consulting in 2018. Since then, she’s carried out a number of legal panel reviews and implemented multiple ebilling solutions for clients.
Sarah said: “It’s great to join forces with Alistair again and I’m looking forward to leading the charge on legal procurement, spend management & ebilling. Together, when I was at Royal Mail, we automated the NDA process, running a pilot with Contract Express, and helping save the company £50k a year in external legal fees, while saving the in–house team time and hassle. It reinforced my view that legal technology can help revolutionise how complex organisations function, driving operational efficiencies that deliver strategic benefits.”
The pandemic and changes in working practices have meant the focus on value and efficiency has never been more important. Legal tech, combined with operational optimisation and data-driven insights, are the tools in–house teams are now demanding to do their jobs effectively.
Sarah added: “Helping customers successfully go on that journey is what I’m passionate about, and I can’t wait to get started.”
In her role at SYKE, Sarah will help customers implement market-leading products such as Legal Tracker from Thomson Reuters – the corporate legal industry’s most widely used software for managing ebilling, matter management, and performance analytics; and Persuit – a leading enterprise platform for engaging outside counsel.
All of SYKE’s engineers typically have a legal background, so when implementing contract lifecycle management tools, or using AI and machine learning to extract contractual terms and metadata from documents, understand the context of what they are automating, not just the power of the software. This blended expertise ensures SYKE-assisted implementations deliver ROI from day one.