A legaltech start-up founded by a pair of former Freshfields associates has announced the appointment of former Meta director of product John Connolly as chief product officer (CPO).
Connolly brings more than 20 years of product experience to London-based Definely, which was launched by Nnamdi Emelifeonwu and Feargus MacDaeid in 2020 after they left Freshfields and provides AI-powered contract drafting and review tools.
Definely counts firms including A&O Shearman, Slaughter and May and DLA Piper as customers and last June raised $30m in a Series B funding round led by growth investor Revaia, saying at the time it would use the funds to support US expansion and develop new products.
Connolly has joined after just over two years as director of product management at Meta, where he led the account integrity team, covering all Facebook, Instagram and advertiser accounts globally.
Before joining Meta he served as CPO for several venture capital and private equity-backed scale-ups, raising more than $100m in funding. He was CPO at Elliptic, a blockchain analytics provider for crypto compliance, and bookkeeping automation platform Dext, as well as information services business firm Springer Nature. Earlier he was also VP of strategy and business development for Expedia.
Emelifeonwu said Connolly was “a leader with a proven track record in both Big Tech and high-growth scale-ups, combining technical depth, commercial strategy and board-level leadership”.
He added: “Appointing John as CPO will be a significant step in driving the company’s international expansion and delivering innovative technological solutions for the legal sector.”
Connolly said: “Definely is addressing one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today – the use of AI to deliver real business value. As the legal industry reaches a critical inflexion point, Definely is well positioned to help law firms and in-house teams as they face rising workloads and growing complexity.”
He added that the primary challenge for AI isn’t just efficiency, it needs to “preserve human understanding and professional integrity”.
Connolly will begin his new role immediately and succeed Bruce Elliot, who served as Definely’s CPO for six years before being advanced to the principal product role in January.
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