Ep 029: Baker McKenzie’s Jae Um and Casey Flaherty on BigLaw Innovation

In January, the world’s largest law firm, Baker McKenzie, announced that it had hired two leading thinkers on legal innovation, Jae Um and D. Casey Flaherty, to help the firm “enhance and reimagine the delivery of legal services to global clients.” They join a team led by David Cambria, who last year left Fortune 50 company Archer Daniels Midland to become the firm’s global director of legal operations.

On this episode of LawNext, Um and Flaherty join host Bob Ambrogi to discuss their new roles and share their thoughts on innovation at Baker McKenzie and in the delivery of legal services.  

Um, who joined Baker McKenzie as director of pricing strategy, has more than 12 years of cross-functional experience in legal business. Most recently, she was founder and executive director of Six Parsecs, a company that applied research rigor, business analytics and storytelling to help legal businesses achieve success. Before that, she was at the law firm Seyfarth Shaw, where she was director of strategic planning and analysis and, earlier, director of special projects. She is a regular contributor to the publication Legal Evolution.

Flaherty, who joined Baker McKenzie as director of legal project management, first rose to prominence while corporate counsel at Kia Motors for creating the Legal Tech Audit, a competency-based learning platform focused on the core technology tools of legal practice, and later the Service Delivery Review, using metrics and benchmarking to drive structured dialogue and continuous improvement between law departments and outside counsel. Based on these concepts, he founded Procertas, providing technology training and benchmarking to law firms, law schools, and other organizations.

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