Transatlantic firm Norton Rose Fulbright (NRF) has hired former PwC board member John Berriman to join its board as its new global chief operating officer.
Berriman joined in December 2016, replacing former operations head Mark Whitley. Berriman enjoyed a 40 year career at PwC where he also served as chief operating officer.
The firm has also made further changes to its global executive committee with the election of Daryl Lansdale as its new US managing partner who took up his role on 1 January this year, replacing incumbent Linda Addison, while long-time NRF partner and former deputy London managing partner Tim Marsden has come off the board.
Whitley quietly left NRF last month after just over two years with the firm. He had been a member of the firm’s board and had been responsible for delivering large parts of the firm’s 2020 transformation strategy, which includes implementing a global rollout of an SAP technology and IT platform and establishing a global services centre in Manila.
Before joining NRF in 2014, Whitley was a managing director at BT from 2008 and also had operations roles at Openreach and Royal Mail.
The addition of Berriman is one of several new appointments for NRF. The transatlantic firm has hired a number of partners into its US business – adding commercial litigation partner Brett Young to its Houston office from K&L Gates earlier this month as well as a real estate team made up of partner Joshua Bernstein and two associates from Greenberg Traurig in New York and Austin.
The firm’s 2020 strategy, launched in 2015, aims to move the firm in a more progressive direction. The four pillars of the strategy include new IT in the form of SAP; a plan for managing a flexible workforce; increased data management; and knowhow, talent and knowledge management.
In an interview with Legal Business last year, NRF global chief executive Peter Martyr (pictured) said: ‘These four pieces are all linked together. We think it is related to what clients want from us. If you are going to run a single system you might as well run the best one in the market.’
matthew.field@legalease.co.uk
Read more on Martyr’s Norton Rose master plan in – ‘On the bus’
