Deloitte Legal has hired three senior personnel – Jack Diggle, Craig Conte and Tom Birdseye – from alternative legal services provider Elevate Services, expanding its legal consultancy arm significantly. 

The most senior hire is Jack Diggle, named as Deloitte Legal’s new lead partner for its legal management consulting arm. Diggle, formerly global head of consulting for Elevate, will be responsible for developing Deloitte’s existing legal capabilities across its technology, change and operations teams, and new technology-based ones. 

Prior to Elevate, Diggle served as head of strategy for Barclays Bank’s legal group and had previously worked at ABN AMRO and PwC.  

Diggle said the move was aimed at supporting in-house counsel, citing “a heightened regulatory environment, increased workloads and the acceleration of new digitally-enabled, agile operating models”.

“By focusing on people, processes and technology, it is possible for legal and contracts teams to work in a smarter way to meet the challenges that lie ahead,”he added.

Also joining the team is Craig Conte, a contract management expert, who brings with him consultancy skills in technology-based legal managed services and over twenty years’ legal practice experience. Conte joins from his role as global head of contracts consulting at Elevate, having previously spent ten years at Capgemini.

The final addition is Tom Birdseye, a legal management consultant with over two decades of experience in change and transformation, including four years at Elevate and eleven years spent at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.  

Birdseye’s focus will be expanding Deloitte’s work with both in-house legal teams and law firms, utilising the firm’s digitally enabled offerings to do so.

Michael Castle, UK managing partner at Deloitte Legal, said the new appointments would ensure Deloitte continued to provide new and integrated solutions for clients. “Now more than ever, legal departments have to address the challenge of dealing with increasing complexity and demand with the same or fewer resources,” he added.

The said the new hires had a “wealth of experience between them which will help these departments and contracting teams rethink their operating models, achieve greater efficiencies and increase the value they deliver back to the business”.

Castle’s own appointment in January 2019 marked a definitive move to expand Deloitte Legal’s team in this area, underlined by Emily Foges’ recent arrival at the firm as lead partner for legal managed services; Foges being the former CEO of Luminance Technologies, an artificial intelligence platform for legal services.

In July it stepped up its US legal offering with the launch of a Legal Business Services practice offering managed legal and consultancy services.

The firm has also invested in the legal technology start-up space, having launched, last December, its tech incubator programme with an initial cohort of 14 start-ups, as well as expanding in the US where it recently also launched a legal business services practice.

Elevate Services has also made recent hires, including legal service transformation expert Stephen Allen joining as vice president of enterprise solutions, and Phil Harris joining as head of a new initiative to provide legal management services for higher education.