As General Counsel and in-house legal teams contend with the increasing pressures facing their organizations in the wake of COVID-19, there is an urgent need to rethink delivery models and transform legal function operations. While the move to digitize and automate the legal function was already underway before COVID-19, it is now a commercial imperative, and the scope and remit is wider than before as the pandemic situation has intensified the need for organizations to transform. 

In response, a Global Legal Operations Transformation Services offering has been launched across KPMG firms, which is designed to provide clients with a wide range of global strategies and cross-border capabilities to help meet the challenges they face. 

“I believe KPMG’s Global Legal Operations Transformation Services teams are ‘global,’ both in terms of the geographic coverage but also the strategies offered,” says Stuart Fuller, Head of Global Legal Services, KPMG International. “Practice leaders are senior, experienced, and work together in KPMG firms across Europe, the Americas and the Asia Pacific region. They have a laser focus on results, and they are delivering significant and measurable improvement for legal functions across KPIs, such as productivity, customer satisfaction and quality measures―results that are crucial for organizations in the current climate.”

The KPMG Legal Operations Transformation Services practice leadership team includes Andreas Bong, Nicola Brooks, Philipp Glock, Eric Gorman, Kimberly Tan Majure and David Murray,  and with an imminent announcement of a significant further partner hire. These leaders are supported by their team members in country firms, and professionals across the global organization, including MBAs, lawyers, legal technologists, data scientists and specialists in operational excellence. Their diverse and complementary skillsets, and combined experience, unite under KPMG’s global methodology to provide significant value to clients.  

“We draw on all of the strengths of KPMG professionals across our firms, not just in legal and technology, but also Lean Six Sigma, Human-Centred Design and Systems Thinking. Together, our organization has achieved a substantial track record of implementing and running the transformation opportunities that we identify,” says Fuller.  “KPMG Law is a combination of skills and approaches: we have over 2,700 lawyers in 81 jurisdictions advising on complex advisory and regulatory matters, and large transactions; we also provide global solutions such as business reorganization, global entity management and mass claims, offering an integrated service and advice.  The new Legal Operations Transformation Service enables KPMG firms to handle large-scale business in a more efficient and technologically-enabled way and is only the first in a number of capabilities and services that we plan to provide in this space.”

The Legal Operations Transformation Services team brings more than 14 years of credentials and experience in the legal transformation space, with recent and current engagements across multinational organizations in the financial services, asset management, automotive, insurance and consumer goods sectors.  In the past two years alone, KPMG firms have delivered cost savings of more than US$200 million across a range of services, including process optimization, automation, contract life cycle management, managed services and productized legal solutions.