SYKE is delighted to announce the appointment of Jonny Badrock as its Head of Data Services. Jonny starts with immediate effect and will be responsible for developing, growing and leading SYKE’s Data Services practice.
Jonny joins SYKE from DWF in Manchester, where he was Head of Research and Development for DWF Ventures. In his last role, he was responsible for leading the research and development team, helping DWF’s clients and its own lawyers identify, design and test new ideas or services.
At SYKE he is tasked with designing solutions which utilise a wide range of technology, but his primary focus will be on helping SYKE’s customers unlock value from their data.
Jonny commented: “It’s a real privilege to be joining SYKE at this stage of its growth and development. I’ve watched Alistair transform the business into a world-leading legal tech consultancy and I look forward to helping it accelerate to the next level.
Having led on a whole range of projects in my previous roles, including process improvement innovation which saved over 20,000 lawyer hours, I understand the pain points and challenges of implementing legal technology, particularly within a law firm. But I’m also a firm believer in harnessing data to enable insight-driven decision making.”
Alistair Maiden, founder and CEO at SYKE said: “Jonny is a unique kind of lawyer, with expertise in innovation and service design. Coupled with his law firm background and nearly a decade of document automation, AI and legal tech experience under his belt, he is ideally placed to drive our Data Services practice onto the next level.”
Almost all SYKE’s highly qualified engineers have a legal background. This means they understand the context of the documents and processes they are automating and can put themselves in the shoes of the end user, be that a lawyer in a firm, an in-house legal user or a commercial business user generating a contract.
Badrock started out as a Real Estate paralegal at Pinsent Masons, before being promoted to Legal Knowledge Engineer, where he specialised in document automation and was part of the founding team to roll out Contract Express firm-wide.
After qualifying as a lawyer at Pinsent Masons, he later joined DWF as Solutions Manager in 2016 to roll out document automation, overseeing the implementation of one of the most effective Contract Express deployments in a law firm (reducing the time taken, increasing the number of documents automated, and optimising the investment required).
He also designed and co-developed software to harness Contract Express to enable DWF to deliver mass automation on large-scale client projects, enabling 1000s of agreements to be generated in a matter of seconds.
Alistair added: “At SYKE we design elegant end to end solutions for our customers by carefully addressing the problem they are trying to solve, assessing their existing tech stack and technical capability, then creating a user-friendly solution that delivers ROI from day one. I look forward to Jonny taking up the charge, and helping more of our customers unlock the potential of data-driven legal tech innovation.”