Norton Rose Fulbright has added a pair of partners from EY to lead its managed legal services arm in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. 

Alex Fortescue-Webb and Daniel Marks join the firm’s legal managed services offering in the London office, where they will be tasked with steering the EMEA operation as part of NRF Transform, the firm’s global innovation and service delivery programme. 

The duo joins NRF after two years as associate partners at EY, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Before that, they worked at Thomson Reuters, where Fortescue-Webb was most recently global head of financial solutions within the company’s legal managed services division. 

At EY, Fortescue-Webb co-led the firm’s contract lifecycle management services for Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, while Marks played a leadership role in the legal managed services team for the same markets with a focus on financial services solutions. 

In their new roles at NRF, the duo will focus on building tech-enabled managed services solutions to help in-house legal teams improve their efficiency, the firm said. 

“Legal managed services bridge the gap between traditional and ‘new law’ to deliver stronger, more efficient and cost-effective results,” Marks said. “This will be our focus whether working on larger scale and more data-intensive projects, as well as enhancing continuing work for clients.”

NRF Transform’s global platform includes more than 150 lawyers, project managers, consultants, legal designers, pricing and commercial specialists, paralegals and development professionals. The operation is headed up by global leader David Carter and regionally managed by Christy Bentz in the US, Felicity Cull in Australia and Nerushka Bowman in South Africa. 

Peter Scott, NRF’s EMEA managing partner, added: “It’s great to welcome Alex and Daniel as we continue to make strategic investments in new capabilities to meet our clients’ evolving needs through NRF Transform. Alex and Daniel have outstanding experience and they will enable us to extend the breadth of our offering to our clients through combined advisory, legal and managed services capabilities.”

Last year, the firm added to NRF Transform when it hired legaltech consultant George Steven from document automation service DocGovern in London. Working alongside NRF’s head of legal operations consulting, Stephanie Hamon, Steven advises those clients on the procurement and implementation of legaltech, particularly around document automation and legal engineering tools, as well as helping in-house teams decide which tech is best suited to them.

Other firms building out their ‘new law’ capabilities in recent months include Allen & Overy, which hired Perth-based lawyer Derek Chia from Herbert Smith Freehills to lead its low cost legal services centre in Australia. The move followed A&O unveiling plans to open a centre in Perth back in November, ten years after its first centre launched in Belfast under the stewardship of longtime partner Angela Clist.