'A new solution to legal outsourcing' – Top 20 Legal IT Innovators 2016: Obelisk CEO Dana Denis-Smith
Legal Week Intelligence, in association with Fulcrum GT, recently published the first edition of its Top 20 Legal IT Innovators report, which profiles…
November 24, 2016 at 11:14 PM
4 minute read
Legal Week Intelligence, in association with Fulcrum GT, recently published the first edition of its Top 20 Legal IT Innovators report, which profiles the law firm leaders, in-house lawyers and tech pioneers driving change in the legal profession.
Click here to download the report from Legal Week Law (free registration required).
Dana Denis-Smith describes herself as an entrepreneur, ex-lawyer and journalist. She is also the founder and CEO of Obelisk Support, which "keeps City lawyers, especially mothers, working flexibly around their family or other personal commitments and provides clients with an affordable and quality legal support solution".
From a standing start in 2010, more than 850 lawyers are now registered with Obelisk – 90% of them women, mostly in their thirties – alongside "mostly older" men. Of these, nearly half have a 'green light' at any one time – like a taxi for hire, they are immediately available for clients.
"I was looking for a new solution to legal outsourcing, which seemed to be all the rage at the time," explains Denis-Smith. "What I could see was a huge number of talented women leaving law firms. Leadership and technical ability don't have anything to do with one another but in law firms they merge as one and the same."
She argues that the long hours culture can be problematic for people with young families: "In that environment, you're measured not for your strengths but for your weaknesses: how many hours you've been in the office rather than what you have achieved – a willingness to compromise everything for work."
Obelisk was conceived with the idea that "outsourcing doesn't need to go abroad, it can be going into people's homes – a return to the cottage industry". She had four lawyers initially given to her by the Law Society "because I begged for people that had been begging them for work". She then got pregnant, "which wasn't in the plan, so in the first year not much happened".
But fairly soon, Obelisk had 120 lawyers on its books. They came via word of mouth and by Denis-Smith spending "a campaigning year going up and down the country, telling people that things needed to change". She explains: "It is our role to change, maybe not law firms, but the way the market operates. This is how I see myself: as an agent of change."
To be considered, would-be Obelisk lawyers are screened for competence and quality. Women who sign up are mostly former senior associates from top 30 UK law firms, with a quarter being ex-magic circle. They work for an average of 22 hours a week. "It's not just about supplying people who want a lifestyle, it's more about people who can't escape their lifestyle: when you have a child you can't escape the responsibility."
Goldman Sachs was one of the first Obelisk clients and still is. Other big names (BT, ING, Siemens) followed and they have a high retention rate. The Obelisk team comprises 12 people managing their lawyers' services – 80% of them in the UK, with the rest spread as far as Dubai and Chile.
"We work with clients that have international operations from a centralised location, rather than creating offices locally," she says, anticipating growth to several thousand lawyers: "It's purely economics: supply and demand." In project management, "there's no such thing as the work being late or not right", she adds. "If Obelisk is delivering, then Obelisk will deliver on time and within budget – and we've never had any issues."
Denis-Smith's plan is to "keep growing and to be in a multidisciplinary space to include accounting. The problems of parenting and working in a professional environment remain – I can't see it ever ending. As long as we have kids, I think that will be a challenge; technology will not do away with the challenge so that's what we're trying to resolve."
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