Former Citi innovation and technology head joins LexFusion in “evolutionary moment”

‍Latest News, Legal Operations, Movers & Shakers, Workflow/Business Process Management / By Caroline Hill - Editor-in-Chief / 12 September 2023

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In a hire described as an “evolutionary moment” by one its founders, New York-headquartered legal tech and innovation accelerator LexFusion has hired Citi’s former director of legal innovation, technology and process improvement, Christina Wojcik, as the new leader of its growing corporate legal operations and technology business.  

Wojcik’s role will include helping LexFusion’s existing member organisations (Agiloft, Factor, Priori and Macro) to interact with corporates by leveraging her in-house counsel network, as well as helping to identify and select further vendors to become part of the LexFusion cooperative.  

At Citi, Wojcik built a legal innovation lab, launched the AI for Legal program, and supported the Citi Ventures team in their diligence process for investment opportunities. Earlier in her career she was pivotal in the growth of Pangea3, an industry-leading global legal services company, and Seal Software, the category builder in enterprise AI contract analytics, which was acquired by DocuSign in May 2020.

Speaking to Legal IT Insider about her experiences to date, Wojcik said: “I have spent most of my time on the vendor side working with corporate counsel on identifying best in class technology and professional services. For the past four years I have been on the buy side, creating the technology strategy for Citi’s global legal department. I have had the opportunity to buy the technology and services that are best aligned to our use case in-house, which has given me an understanding of what it takes to help build an organisation and be aligned with the corporate’s needs.”  

She added: “When I was on the sell side, I never appreciated how hard the in-house teams were working to bring in my product. It’s an incredibly complex process and if you’re working in a tier one financial institution, it takes a village. You have to understand the complexity of the village: it might not be that they don’t want to buy your product, but that they have to go through an extensive security process, and I hope I can guide our members through what that looks like to help accelerate the process.”

The innovation lab saw Wojcik create an environment in which Citi could test new technologies free from the normal constraints of a large financial institution. Wojcik said: “When I joined Citi over four years ago, we had many different layers of tech support available but a lot were aligned to moving from implementation, to deployment and business as usual, not to giving us freedom to test and make mistakes.  

“I wanted a safe space to test the products and fail fast, so that if something didn’t work, we hadn’t gone down the line of investment and deployment.”  

At LexFusion, Wojcik will be looking to bring on board new technology providers, and told us: “I have some ideas on how we might be able to service our current and future members slightly differently. Right now the model is working very effectively but we’ll be evaluating the transactional space as well as entity and board management, which is a huge area for corporate legal teams.”

With Wojcik’s hire, LexFusion – co-founded by Joe Borstein, Casey Flaherty and Paul Stroka – expands its team to eight professionals across the globe, offering  experience in generative AI, law firm management, corporate legal operations and technology, business development, litigation support & technology, and contracting support & technology.  

Commenting on the hire, Flaherty told Legal IT Insider: “Christina is awesome, period. But for us hiring someone of this calibre, with this kind of profile, is an evolutionary moment.”