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CMS Appoints New Director of Innovation and Knowledge

Frankfurt, 3 June 2019 – International law firm, CMS, has announced that Jane Challoner has been appointed to the new role of Director of Innovation and Knowledge.

Jane moves from CMS UK where she previously held the position of Head of Tech Innovation - leading on research, development and the implementation of CMS’s innovation strategy.

In her new role, Jane will lead CMS’s Innovation Team which investigates and pilots new technologies, services and business models. She will be responsible for aligning the firm’s knowledge, legal tech and innovation capabilities. Jane will work alongside existing CMS functions, to improve the quality, timeliness and efficiency of the service provided to CMS’s clients.

Jane is a qualified lawyer. Prior to her recent Innovation role, she managed a number of multi-disciplinary teams as Head of International Knowledge and People and then Head of Learning and Development before moving to work on various firm strategic and knowledge projects. She has extensive international operational experience having set up, run and restructured multiple business services lines.

Duncan Weston, Executive Partner, commented, “At CMS we pride ourselves on our innovative and progressive outlook. Legal technology is becoming increasingly essential to drive value in our work, and it is the role of our Innovation Team to tech-enable our services in ways that best suit our clients.

“Jane will play a key role in ensuring that CMS stays on the front foot and responds appropriately to ongoing changes in the market. She is a highly accomplished and experienced leader and I am confident that she will do a great job of leading CMS’s dedicated, multidisciplinary innovation team.”

Currently, CMS clients are benefiting from artificial intelligence solutions to accelerate contract review and due diligence, expert legal apps and bespoke collaboration portals to share documents, knowledge and get regular matter status and fee updates. The firm is also able to save money and mitigate risk with custom automated documents and access to specialist legal project management teams. For example, CMS used the AI application, Kira, to review 3,000 commercial contracts in 22 languages for the HP Inc. acquisition of Samsung’s printer business, saving the client crucial time and allowing the team to focus on more complex issues.

Jane Challoner commented, “It is really exciting to be given the opportunity to take forward the global CMS vision for future-facing law. There is so much that we are already collaborating on around the three key pillars of people, process and technology but we want to pick up the pace. We are currently working on a transformational Cloud platform to allow CMS clients to benefit from local data and insight delivered via our high-quality global brand. Our innovation efforts are primarily client facing and we always co-create to solve their pain points before our own.”