Monday, May 16, 2011

Linklaters Purchases Autonomy

News here from Autonomy of their recent legal win with global giant Linklaters. The firm will be using the powerful search tool across their Knowledge repositories using the new user-orientated enterprise search platform powered by IDOL. Great win for the Autonomy gang, and validation that search is indeed still relevant and on the radar for Knowledge systems.

HighQ Solutions Moving & Shaking

News from HighQ HQ that they are on the move. The team have moved closer to our new favourite roof top venue (Mint Hotel's Sky Lounge) to Great Tower Street. All indications of even more exciting news and technology leadership from the group after an excellent Sunday brunch with Director Stuart Barr at Dishoom. If you have not already, make sure you follow their movements on Twitter @highqsolutions.

Phoenix Business Solutions & DTE Event

Phoenix Business Solutions will be holding a DTE event on June 1st in London at The Savoy. Full details of the event here. This is well worth attending, particularly based on their recent win with Olswang (see here). The team also had a very successful private round table in Sydney recently with some of the Janders Dean friends and family large law CFOs. Expect more soon.

UK Law Firms - Knowledge Management & IT Recruitment

An interesting two months of change in the UK law firm support department leadership areas - particularly in Knowledge Management and Information Technology.

Innovator Sam Diamond of Clifford Chance fame will be leaving to join Norton Rose as the Global Knowledge Management Director, and will also have a new peer as the firm also announces a new global CIO. Sheila Doyle joins in the role, and has previously held IT roles at BP, IBM and, most recently, Royal Mail, which she left last year to work on a freelance basis. Full details
here.

In other moves, Chris White of Ashurst fame has emerged as the new interim CIO at Kennedys, with former Kennedys CIO Ian Lawreys moving to Barlow Lyde & Gilbert. Tim Hyman (previously IT Director at Taylor Wessing) has moved to Reed Smith to become IT Director EMEA of the global firm, while upcoming appointments in the Knowledge Management field should also be expected from firms Stephenson Harwood and Osbourne Clark.

Janders Dean congratulates all the movers and shakers on their exciting new challenges.

More UK Firms Chase Great Australian Dream

After a whirl wind two years of arrivals, mergers, and scouting trips, yet another major UK firm is seeking a presence in Australia. After the arrival (via various methods) of Allen & Overy, Norton Rose, DLA Piper, and Clifford Chance, news has leeked this morning in London from The Lawyer regarding Herbert Smith's plans to arrive in the land of uranium, coal and beer coolers. Full story here.

Autonomy Buys Iron Mountain

Autonomy have announced details of their approach to purchase part of the digital division of Iron Mountain.

"We are pleased to announce this transaction, one we have been looking at for some time, which will bring significant advancements for customers," commented Dr. Mike Lynch, Group CEO of Autonomy. "Processing customer data in the cloud continues to be a strategic part of Autonomy's information governance business. We look forward to extending regulatory compliance, legal discovery and analytics to a host of new customers as well as enabling the intelligent collection and processing of non-regulatory data from distributed servers, PCs and especially tens of millions of mobile devices. This will afford the opportunity to bring to these customers the power of IDOL's meaning-based technology."

Excellent summary of the purchase details here at The Orange Rag
here.