Rachel leads WBD Advance, Womble Bond Dickinson's alternative legal services provider, which is composed of a talented group of over 100 professionals, including lawyers, paralegals, project managers, technologists, and management information specialists. The team is responsible for delivering managed services and bespoke solutions to internal and client business issues across a range of legal practice areas.
Rachel is a qualified lawyer with 13 years post qualification experience, six years working as a full time solicitor specialising in employment law and a further seven years with a wider remit including service design and set up, project implementation, technology adoption, and business development.
Experience
Rachel's experience includes:
- Undertaking process optimisation of traditional legal workstreams to deliver repeatable, consistent and auditable outcomes. Working with clients and stakeholders within the business to identify opportunities for growth and expansion of the workstreams, running project pilots, managing budgets, leading workforce, implementing new ways of working and overseeing day to day operations across a range of legal disciplines.
Specific examples include:
- Developing a managed redaction service for clients, balancing their procurement and FOI obligations, supervising hundreds of contracts prior to publication (an ongoing service).
- Initiating and maintaining a process for monitoring of condition precedent compliance in relation to applications for government grant funding (an ongoing service).
- Designing a cost-effective/time saving solution to keep track of UK divergence from EU legislation post-Brexit (particularly in the construction sector). A fixed term service provided for two years.
- Managing the production, issuance and execution of funding scheme documentation on behalf of a lender together with monitoring and reporting key client information. A fixed term service provided for two years.
- Providing consultancy assistance to design a process to review, categorise and prioritise a global pharmaceutical client's physical archives; acknowledging retention requirements, and/or preservation notices connected to ongoing litigation.
- Delivering an overflow service for a global Bank reviewing proposed customer transactions and their impact on the Bank's security (an ongoing service).
- Developing an employment tribunal case management system for volume claims, producing all the processes and templates with relevant prompts and automations.
- Initiating a data subject access review model, training a team, producing workflows and quality assurance/continuous improvement systems.
- Implementing a litigation support and bundling service, reviewing and optimising traditional processes and using data to better allocate resources and provide more accurate timescales and budgets.
- Delivering a helpline on behalf of an insurer providing legal advice to its 18,000 policyholders using collaboration software. Managing the paralegals who deal with the initial contact and reporting requirements and supporting lawyers with questions of policy.
