Richard Hodkinson C.Eng.,F.Iet Email & Phone Number

United Kingdom

Nottingham, Gb

Full service commercial law. Turnover of £145m, 13 offices, 1200 staff. IT budget £9m. Team 45 FTE. Reporting to the Managing Partner and COO and member of the Operations Board. Chair a governing group for technology and innovation. Delivered a £5m+ transformation programme. Designed to meet the business’s prevailing strategy for growth, dispensing with legacy platforms. Gained a competitive position commensurate with peer firms and with operational headroom to support a £200m+ business. Scope - all platforms, applications, team structures, sourcing model and vendor changes, security+. Owned the outgoing roadmap for the newly acquired legal Practice Management System (Aderant), Document Management System (iManage), Workday HCM, M365, Teams Telephony, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint etc.  Built an IT group from 5 to 45 over 4 years including insourcing from a long-term contract outsourced contract. Class leading service enhancement at no extra cost. Board and business recognition. Created confidence for growth. ESG agenda, reduced paper use by 1m sheets per year through a print fleet 1/3 previous size, education and other digital tools through an outsourced service. Six figure cost save. Supporting businesses need for agility and risk containment, all application choices have been SaaS or externally hosted. This includes a specifically designed Disaster Recovery as-a-service. Recognising the changing cyber landscape accelerated by Covid, I create the first information security function at the firm. Team 4 FTE complete with investment . Annual board presentation. Retired over 50 suppliers to consolidate services and value.  Hosted and supported the systems for the ‘Mr Bates’ Post Office litigation. Delivered client portals for direct online client instructions for two house hold name clients. Met client expectation, support the brand and continued the theme of digital transformation.

London, Gb

Full service commercial international law with significant Insurance defence business. Turnover of £350m, 30+ offices globally, 3500 staff. IT, Facilities and Knowledge Management budget £39.5m - IT c£15m. 200 FTE, IT 110 FTE. Reported to Global Managing Partner/CEO. Executive Board and Risk Committee Member. Chairman of dwf360 Ltd, a software business wholly owned by DWF. £2.1m turnover. Small portfolio of cloud products in the claims, complaints, and risk arena. NED of a northwest hosting business. Lead the board in a 4-year cloud first IT strategy rationalising line of business applications, 14 change initiatives, six figure savings in line with a digital transformation strategy. Supported rapid international expansion. Recognised in the sector for being different, quantities of press coverage and awards – listed with the CEO as part of Law Firm Management team of the year. Panel events and speaker. Organised the IT team to deliver rapid UK and international expansion through M&A. 20+, all achieved on time with no lost days of production. Turnover moved from £90m to £350m. Delivered Qlikview MI/BI tooling improving the speed of monthly MI from 3 weeks to 3 days. Significant client benefit through deployed IBM tools for data analytics and visualisation demonstrating possible fraudulent claims against the firm’s insurance clients. Cost management achieved by outsourcing selective services delivering a 20% overhead reduction.  Collaboration tool Yammer globally deployed to facilitate international team working and new business development. Designed and built the firm’s first client portal – ‘DWF Link’ to demonstrate innovative capability to clients during the tender process with clients. Installed and operated workflow systems for 1000 users in the £100m+ Insurance division. Highly available and rapidly developed with a dedicated dev team to meet the demands of the Insurance sector.  AI POC project with an incubator business in Cambridge.

A boutique software company delivering a cloud based solution for risk management. Claims and/or complaints with complete history become transparent for the business user and also the insurance broker and the insurer.

United Kingdom, Gb

Irwin Mitchell grew from 500 staff to 2400 employees nationwide and in Europe with a turnover > £150m. IT and Operations c200 staff. Main board role. Reported to National Managing Partner. NED of a security business for a short period. Average 1 merge per year delivered absorbed and supported with no loss of service. Technology automation driven reputation for excellence for processing of PI and insurance claims. Dedicated development function, rapid turnaround to meet new client onboarding and many changes in regulation in the PI claims market and the governments Access to Justice.  Technology responsibility for Off-shore processes to Sri Lanka. Due diligence and operational work around the M&A effort. Templated approached developed. Built a 100 seat Cisco based call centre for the sectors first TV PI claims campaign. I established a transformation programme to replace 16 legacy system to be replaced by 3. Significant cost reduction combined with process improvement. I initiative and achieved ISO27001 formerly BS5799 accreditation, the first major laws firm to achieve this.

The task was to implement Oracle Financials to several of the YE group’s business units. Successful implementation of the systems required a solid grasp of the business at a detailed process level. Management of a small group of people was required which included contract programmers and staff seconded from the business units. Collectively, plans were developed which addressed implementation issues such as; legacy data migration, user acceptance testing, user training and implementation.

Wolverhampton, Gb

B&H is an engineering product stockist and reseller with > 40 UK warehousing and trade counters. Managing a small team, I implemented a distributed UNIX/Cobol based branch trading system. The application was a predecessor to the modern day ERP solutions covering; sales order processing, stock control, purchasing, trade counter, picking and despatch. Further refinements were made to optimise algorithms which balanced stock holding and availability across the 35,000 lines. At this time, this was the largest UNIX based project within the P&O group and was successfully implemented without interruption to the business.

Electronic Systems & Control Engineering, Engineering & Tecnology

Education record