top 20 legal it innovators 2016 - dominic carman … · to introduce the annual top 20 legal it...

Top 20 Legal IT Innovators 2016Profiling the leaders of unprecedented change in the legal industry

@LegalWeekIntel | legalweek.com — 1

Top 20 Legal IT Innovators 2016

4 Richard Susskind

IT adviser, Lord Chief Justice of Eng & Wales

5 Dana Denis-Smith

Obelisksupport.com

6 Joe Andrew

Dentons

8 David Kerr

Bird & Bird

10 Craig Courter

Baker & McKenzie

12 Andrew Arruda

ROSS Intelligence

14 Ranajoy Basu

Reed Smith

16 Wim Dejonghe

Allen & Overy

18 Stuart Whittle

Weightmans

20 Mike Rebeiro

Norton Rose Fulbright

22 David Morley

Allen & Overy

24 Julia Salasky

CrowdJustice

26 Simon Harper

Lawyers On Demand

28 Louise Pentland

PayPal

30 Justin Stock

Cooley (London)

32 Robert Zahler

Pillsbury

34 Professor David Wilkins

Harvard Law School

38 Wang Junfeng

King & Wood Mallesons (China)

40 Pádraig Ó Ríordáin

Arthur Cox

42 Patrice Cappello

SAP

Contents

Dominic Carman is a freelance writer, journalist and consultant.

He executes bespoke projects for international law firms and

investment banks – from thought leadership and report writing

to digital content, ghostwriting and speechwriting.

His clients include: Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Hogan

Lovells, Sullivan & Cromwell, JP Morgan and the European best friends of

Slaughter and May. He also undertakes projects for leading independent law firms

in Europe and has increasingly been retained by management consultancies and IT

companies servicing the international legal market.

Carman’s clients say that they improve their results when they improve their

communication skills – this is what he helps them to do.

For further information, please see: www.dominiccarman.com

Report author: Dominic Carman

James Mayer manages Legal Week Intelligence, the research arm of global legal

publication Legal Week. He has worked on major research pieces with top global

law firms and FTSE 350 companies, on topics ranging from bribery and corruption

to Middle Eastern investment into Africa, as well as law firm employee and client

satisfaction. He regularly attends and presents at Legal Week events.

For further information, please email: [email protected]

Director of research: James Mayer

Chris Morrish has 12 years’ experience in financial publishing with organisations

including ALM, Mergermarket, Incisive Media and FT Business.

For further information, please see: www.pagelab.co.uk

Design and production: Chris Morrish

2 — legalweek.com | @LegalWeekIntel




Impetus to innovate

The legal industry is undergoing unprecedented change. Driven by a globalised economy and fast-changing customer demands, it is poised for a digital transformation that will redefine professional services in the years to come. Industry experts, thought leaders and innovators will be the driving forces in shaping how the future of this industry will look. To introduce the annual Top 20 Legal IT Innovators report, highlighting the leaders that are driving this change, Legal Week consulted Fulcrum Global Technologies chief, Ahmed Shaaban, a recognised thought leader and innovator in commercial enterprise and cloud solutions serving the mainstream of Fortune 500 companies and global professional services firms.

Artificial Intelligence , augmented reality, cyber security, machine

learning, legal process outsourcing, in-memory computing,

the cloud and the Big Four law firm. The list goes

on. What will stick? What will provide value?

What is yet to be explored? Who will

prosper and who will fall?

Everything as it stands today for

law firms is poised to change in the

next three to five years – and that

is a good thing. Doing things ‘the

way they have always been done’

should not dictate how firms are

run today and in the future. In

the next decade, if they fail to

keep pace with technology, 40%

of the S&P 500 will disappear.1

The solution lies within

their business models and their

receptiveness to manage not only

the challenges to come, but also the

challenges that have arrived: a real-

time, mobile, automated, intelligent, data-

driven world, where clients mandate flexibility,

responsiveness and consistency.

As firms look to the future and ask themselves how they will

operate in the business of law instead of the legal business, there

will be opportunities to take advantage of cross-industry best

1 ‘A Decade to Mass Extinction Event in S&P 500’ – CNBC, 4 June 2014: www.cnbc.com/2014/06/04/15-years-to-extinction-sp-500-companies.html

practices and emerging technologies that have not yet been

applied in legal.

Additional opportunities will exist to

drive down cost by utilising sourcing and

procurement methods, and through

exploring partnerships that will

open doors leading to new business

opportunities and new markets.

Emerging technologies and their

application have transformed the

legal industry more rapidly than

most people anticipated they

would. Today’s technology helps

firms run better, faster, smoother

and smarter than ever before.

However, in the wake of current

digital evolution, many law firms

and legal departments find themselves

technologically behind, afraid to adopt

developing technologies and disruptions that

could provide value in unimagined ways. This

leaves firms unable to support their current and, more

alarmingly, future growth requirements and strategies.

Technology is a catalyst in all of this but it takes more than

technology to make this change a reality. The innovators who

follow are challenging the norm, embracing disruption and

looking to the future of how they want to see their industry five,

10 and even 20 years from now.

Introduction by Ahmed Shaaban, chairperson, Top 20 Legal IT Innovators 2016

In the next decade, if they fail to keep pace with technology, 40%

of the S&P 500 will disappear



Can computers solve legal problems?

Richard Susskind is a pivotal figure in legal

technology. An acclaimed strategist and

thinker, a distinguished academic (he holds

professorships at Oxford and UCL among

others), and author of nine influential

books, Susskind has been an IT

adviser to the Lord Chief Justice

of England & Wales for nearly 20

years. In 2000, he received an

OBE for his services to IT in the

law and to the Administration

of Justice, and since 2011, he has

been president of the Society for

Computers and Law.

“I’ve really tried to influence

thinking across the legal profession,”

he says. “I like to think I have influenced

a generation of lawyers in their thinking

about the profound impact of technology on

law.” After writing his Oxford doctorate on law

and AI in the mid-1980s, he developed with Phillip

Capper (now a White & Case partner), the world’s first commercially

available AI system in law (The Latent Damage System) in 1988.

Susskind’s global reach is significant: his work has been

translated into 12 languages and he has lectured in more than

40 countries. At a practical level, his influence has been equally

widespread as an adviser to several of the world’s leading law firms

on issues relating to future strategy and their use of technology. He

describes the relationships with these firms, such as Allen & Overy,

as “longstanding, not occasional projects”.

More than anything Susskind sees himself as a catalyst.

“Fundamentally, my interest is: can computers solve legal

problems?” he explains. “That’s partly a technical question and

partly a philosophical question.” But his ideas and his thinking are

entirely pragmatic.

“Law firms can think they are innovative because they are

automating in an innovative way because no one has ever automated

in that way before,” he says. “But my more technical meaning of

innovation is really bringing about change in the underlying

process. As in so many sectors, lawyers are inclined to dress up

their automation as innovation. They want to suggest that the use of

technology to streamline the old ways of working is perhaps more

adventurous than it really is.”

As a legal disruptor, Susskind questions the

way in which law firms see themselves as

businesses and how they offer services to

clients.

“I want to challenge lawyers to

understand the potential technology

and use it,” he says, “not simply to

preserve 20th century legal practice,

but to redefine the way the legal

professionals can help their clients.

By legal professionals, I don’t just

mean traditional lawyers, I mean

people who are legal technologists

and legal process analysts and legal

knowledge engineers. My running

theme is for the 2020s: it’s not going to

be a decade of unemployment but it will

be a decade of redeployment; we’ve got to

learn to work differently.”

Challenging the status quo – the established

ways of thinking and doing things – makes some

lawyers feel uncomfortable, particularly when part of what he

advocates is “taking the cost out of legal service”. Looking ahead,

Susskind believes the “more for less” challenge will be critical:

“It’s going to define and underpin the way that we evolve our legal

services. Technology is one of the key ways of allowing us to do the

same or a better job than in the past but for a lower cost – that’s

the key.”

Richard Susskind , IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England & Wales

My running theme is for the 2020s: it’s not going to be a decade of unemployment

but it will be a decade of redeployment; we’ve got to learn to work differently



A new solution to legal outsourcing

Dana Denis-Smith describes herself

as an entrepreneur, ex-lawyer

(Linklaters) and journalist. She

is also the founder and CEO

of obelisksupport.com,

which “keeps City lawyers,

especially mothers,

working flexibly around

their family or other

personal commitments

and provides clients

with an affordable and

quality legal support

solution”. Dana and

her Obelisk team

are multiple award

winners.

From a standing start

in 2010, more than 850

lawyers are now registered

with Obelisk – 90% of them

women, mostly in their thirties

– alongside “mostly older” men. Of

these, nearly half have a ‘green light’

at any one time – like a taxi for hire, they

are immediately available for clients.

“I was looking for a new solution to legal outsourcing,

which seemed to be all the rage at the time,” explains Denis-

Smith. “What I could see was a huge number of talented women

leaving law firms. Leadership and technical ability don’t have

anything to do with one another but in law firms they merge as

one and the same.”

She argues that the long hours culture can be problematic

for people with young families: “In that environment, you’re

measured not for your strengths but for your weaknesses: how

many hours you’ve been in the office rather than what you have

achieved – a willingness to compromise everything for work.”

Obelisk was conceived with the idea that “outsourcing doesn’t

need to go abroad, it can be going into people’s homes – a return

to the cottage industry”. She had four lawyers initially given to

her by the Law Society “because I begged for people that had been

begging them for work”. She then got pregnant, “which wasn’t in

the plan, so in the first year not much happened”.

But fairly soon, Obelisk had 120 lawyers on its

books. They came via word of mouth and by

Denis-Smith spending “a campaigning

year going up and down the country,

telling people that things needed

to change”. She explains: “It

is our role to change, maybe

not law firms, but the way

the market operates. This

is how I see myself: as an

agent of change.”

To be considered, would-

be Obelisk lawyers are

screened for competence

and quality. Women who

sign up are mostly former

senior associates from top

30 UK law firms, with a

quarter being ex-magic circle.

They work for an average of

22 hours a week. “It’s not just

about supplying people who want

a lifestyle, it’s more about people who

can’t escape their lifestyle: when you have

a child you can’t escape the responsibility.”

Goldman Sachs was one of the first Obelisk clients

and still is. Other big names (BT, ING, Siemens) followed

and they have a high retention rate. The Obelisk team comprises 12

people managing their lawyers’ services – 80% of them in the UK,

with the rest spread as far as Dubai and Chile.

“We work with clients that have international operations from

a centralised location, rather than creating offices locally,” she

says, anticipating growth to several thousand lawyers: “It’s purely

economics: supply and demand.” In project management, “there’s no

such thing as the work being late or not right”, she adds. “If Obelisk

is delivering, then Obelisk will deliver on time and within budget –

and we’ve never had any issues.”

Denis-Smith’s plan is to “keep growing and to be in a

multidisciplinary space to include accounting. The problems of

parenting and working in a professional environment remain – I

can’t see it ever ending. As long as we have kids, I think that will be

a challenge; technology will not do away with the challenge so that’s

what we’re trying to resolve.”

Dana Denis-Smith, founder and CEO, obelisksupport.com



Increasing quality and reducing cost

Joe Andrew is global chairman of Dentons, the world’s largest law

firm. As architect of the firm’s strategy, he has overseen a series

of international mergers, most notably last year’s combination

with Chinese law firm, Dacheng. Asked to serve by President Bill

Clinton, Andrew became national chairman of the Democratic

National Committee from 1999 to 2001. Since joining Dentons

as a corporate lawyer in 2004, he has advised on deals worth

more than $500bn, most notably in the healthcare and insurance

sectors.

Dentons is different in many ways from other law firms. It dares

to innovate even in leadership. “Of all the big global law firms,

we’re the one which has two leaders at the top,” says Andrew. In

referring to Elliot Portnoy, global chief executive officer (CEO) of

Dentons, he adds: “Elliot and I are literally tied at the hip. We

have different areas of concentration in the process as well; we do

virtually everything together and there’s nothing that I do that

Elliot couldn’t do, or isn’t involved in in some way in the process.”

Andrew sees Dentons’ leadership structure as a metaphor for the

firm: “We have team leadership throughout the entire process and

we’ve done an effective job of making sure that power is as close

to the decision makers who actually understand the particular

details in each given area.

“We call that polycentric. That is our principal innovation.

It is often misunderstood because polycentric for us is not just

marketing, how we go to market, it’s how we’ve organised the

entire firm. It’s what allows us to be able to have decision making

as close as possible to the stacks on the ground, which allow us

to be able to make the best decisions in the process and therefore

have this multi-headed strategy all

operating at the same time in the

same place.”

Andrew never stops innovating:

there are many feathers in

his cap. Given the scale of his

responsibilities – “we have

more than 7,500 lawyers in

144 locations in 58 countries

around the world, with people

who speak 72 languages” –

he certainly needs to. The

firm’s most recent high profile

innovation, Nextlaw Labs, is

one such innovation.

Its purpose is to help

resolve a conflict between

two competing objectives, as

he explains: “All law firms,

particularly large firms, are faced

with a challenge: our clients want

us to use new technology and new

processing to increase quality and

reduce cost. At the same time, they only

want to hire lawyers who have the right

level of experience.”

As a solution, he describes Nextlaw Labs as

“a skunk works” – a term borrowed from IBM –

“where the things that might not be perceived today

to be core to your business but you believe will be later,

are done in a separate entity”. He adds: “The idea is that you

can bring people together to collaborate in a place that is not

internal to the law firm itself.”

Nextlaw Labs was founded because “as technologies develop

at different rates, we don’t know which technology will be the

winner”, says Andrew. It aims to do four different things: “It can

evaluate new technology that comes up; it can invest in those

technologies so that we reap the benefit of trying to be involved in

them; it enables us to develop our own technology; and it helps us

take existing technology and form a suite of services.”

Nextlaw is conceived as a brand for multiple entities, each of

them centred on innovation. There are seven, as yet unannounced,

ideas in the pipeline. Apart from Nextlaw Labs, the other one that

Joe Andrew, global chairman, Dentons

If you think about the uberisation of law, that is what NLGRN allows us to do. Fundamentally, what it does is

to match clients out there to the specific talent that

they need



has seen the light of day created significant waves and generated

publicity across the legal world.

In May, Dentons launched Nextlaw Global Referral Network

(NLGRN), which allows independent firms to collaborate at no cost.

“If you think about the uberisation of law, that is what NLGRN

allows us to do. Fundamentally, what it does is to match clients out

there to the specific talent that they need.”

Andrew outlines the strategy: “We’re the world’s largest law

firm but we’re honest that we’re not the best law firm for each

client in each given place,” he says. “There are many places in the

world that we are not in at all – more than 300 cities with more

than a million people in them that we are not even in – and

we are far bigger than anyone else. If you’re honest about truly

having a law firm that has global reach, you have to see other

law firms not as competitors, but as collaborators.”

The challenge with existing law firm networks, he

suggests, is: “They’re all pay-to-play: the only way that a

network can work and still have an executive director,

a website and somebody who answers the telephone, is

that you’ve got to pay a fee. If you pay a fee, you tend

to want to exclude competition.”

Andrew explains that the goal of NLGRN is “to

use a technology platform, which makes it less

expensive, delivers a better service and is more

accessible, and simply say: we will pay for any

other cost and so the network can actually be free”.

He continues: “The only qualification to be in the

network is the quality of the firm and no one has

to pay. Why does our referral network succeed

where others don’t? It’s because there’s no barrier

to entry, it’s free and it’s not territorially exclusive.

World’s largest law firm plus world’s largest referral

network – that’s the future of the legal profession.”

How well has it worked so far? “We have the problem

of success,” Andrew says. “We have significantly more

law firms seeking to apply, particularly firms that we

do not have a pre-existing relationship with, that have

to be vetted by the committee. So yes, we are on schedule,

everything is working out well, but we are honest to say we

are a bit overwhelmed by the response.

“Think of all the great law firms that are out there that may

have five or 10 lawyers, 95% of the legal profession is with people

in law firms of less than 100 people. No one would let them in to a

referral network. Now, all of a sudden, they’re saying: I can be in a

referral network with the world’s largest law firm.”

Andrew has a vision: “To be able to look in the eye the most

sophisticated multinational corporation in the world, which is

going to give out high value work, and say: we either have, or I

can instantaneously find for you here on my smartphone in my

pocket, the exact right lawyer, in the exact right location, in order

to handle your challenge. We’ve identified what we consider to be

263 unique jurisdictions, which we think are key, right now, based

on GDP and analysis of legal work, that we need to have either one

very good law firm or multiple law firms in.”

In September, Dentons announced that Stephen Harper, the

former Prime Minister of Canada from 2006 to 2015, had affiliated

with the firm. Another coup for Dentons and another feather in

Andrew’s cap.



For 20 years, David Kerr has been CEO of Bird

& Bird and before that, acted for some of

the largest telecoms operators in the

UK and Europe. As an international

law firm, Bird & Bird enjoys a

strong reputation for helping

clients in technology, or which

are being transformed by the

use of technology. It currently

works with 43 of the Fortune

Top 100 companies and

60 of the world’s 100 most

innovative companies, as

named by Forbes.

“We are very focused as a

firm,” says Kerr. “Our entire

market focus is on industries that

are either based on tech or being

fundamentally changed by tech.

We almost have to be among the most

innovative firms in the way in which we

use technology to satisfy that client base, in

order to be credible.”

One of the big lessons he has learned is that firms cannot just

develop technology solutions in isolation from the service that

they provide. “Often, law firms fall into the trap of building

something very clever and very technical,” he says. “But clients

don’t want to use it.” Instead, he likes solutions that “remove

the black box of law”. By this, he means using technology to

give clients more accurate information about the different

components of the services. “That’s exciting,” he says.

Describing a really good technology-based solution in a law

firm, one that’s really effective, he suggests: “It will have that

element of doing what we did before but making it more efficient,

better managed, with much clearer components of what’s going

on. Really good solutions can take a long time to evolve.”

Conceived a decade ago, Kerr points to an innovative online

client platform, which was his idea. “It enabled us to manage

services better, it gave clients much more control, multi-country,

enabled them to manage transactions, procurements, major

projects and litigation from a secure platform. And we built

it. It was extraordinary how it evolved over time. But the core

idea remains as true now as it did 10 years ago.” More than 60%

of the firm’s key clients now use it – “A real

achievement,” he adds.

Kerr believes that law firms need

a culture of innovation. “We work

quite hard at encouraging people

– often not partners but younger

people inside the organisation,

whether they are lawyers or

in business services, to come

up with good ideas or good

improvements. For example,

you are more likely to get

innovative ideas on usage of

social media from younger

generations coming up. You’ve

got to have a culture where

that is applauded and rewarded,

and it’s often the recognition

that matters the most. That really

matters.

“Does that make our service better? Yes,

it does. That’s key: the culture of innovation

has got to be really strong. When innovative ideas get

rolled out, you capture the imagination of partners. They need to

be motivated to talk about it with clients in an excited way, so

these clients immediately start being extremely interested.”

Innovation has been applied successfully in the firm’s new

risk management tools and is “very far down the road” in new

disclosure and litigation management systems. “We’ve got very

substantial takeup by clients and we’re slightly bemused because

we keep on seeing independent companies or law firms charging

for what we now just offer as part of the deal,” says Kerr. “Maybe

we’re missing a trick but demystifying the use of electronic

resources in managing vast volumes of data that you get on

investigations or litigation, is part of the service.”

This applies across all the offices of the firm in multiple

jurisdictions. So how does he manage this simultaneous

uniformity? “It’s always hard because law firms famously

struggle with having a command and control corporate

structure, because lawyers get brought up to be independently

minded – that’s their job in theory. What you’ve got to do is

capture their imagination. It’s all about getting them excited by

the idea of what we’re doing in the firm and it’s the same with

Removing the black box of lawDavid Kerr, chief executive officer, Bird & Bird



and they have a bigger vision of the use of systems, software,

databases, AI. You name it.”

As a consequence, he suggests: “They are able to harness this

and say to the client: we can give you guidance on how you should

go about managing your legal requirements and indeed, related

requirements. It’s not just about legal, it can often be about related

knowledge management, related consulting issues, and we are

grappling with all three areas.”

innovation. Make no mistake though – if you adopt some of

these innovations, lawyers have to change what they do.”

He remains an optimist about the future role of technology in

legal services. “Lawyers who make use of systems to help them

do their work better, and who do that well, are going to have a

fantastic future. There’s no end of opportunities. There is scope

for lawyers to build part of what they do. They can become legal

architects; architects of how the service is going to be performed

You are more likely to get innovative ideas on usage

of social media from younger generations coming up. You’ve

got to have a culture where that is applauded and

rewarded



Craig Courter is global chief operating officer at Baker &

McKenzie, consistently recognised as the world’s strongest

law firm brand by Acritas. Perhaps no surprise given that it

has more than 4,600 full-time lawyers in 77 offices across 47

countries. With that spread of responsibility, Courter needs to be

innovative.

The seeds of his innovative thinking were sown early. “I was

particularly lucky because I learned to programme in high school

in 1969. I left school knowing six programming languages and

have always enjoyed, as a hobby, programming and staying current

with the field: you get an intuitive feeling of whether something

can be done or not, because you can actually go do it.”

His hobby soon paid off. “I was in the navy for six years and

went to law school at night,” he says. “When I started practising

law in 1986, the firm I worked at didn’t have a computer; we had

memory typewriters but that was it. I suggested replacing the old

red Lexis terminal with a personal computer: the partners at my

firm (in San Diego) took a risk and we did.” The investment worked.

He then encouraged his firm to invest in a local area network and

later, barcode technology.

“In the mid-90s, we ran many trials and hearings with barcode-

driven computer technology. That’s not because the partners said:

here’s a good idea, go do it. It’s because they listened to people, like

me, who had our finger on the pulse both of what technology could

do and how to practice law, and could marry the two together.

They took a risk, let us do it and it turned out to be successful.”

Courter has been at the forefront of innovation ever since.

So how does he see it in practice today at Baker & McKenzie?

“Innovation is critical and technology is probably the great

leveller because it’s not that expensive to get into. Until a

few years ago, law firms weren’t particularly innovative,

just recycling ideas that our clients and the big accounting

firms had had for years. For the legal field those ideas

were innovative, because we were a little bit behind,

especially in technology.”

Whereas in AI, “nobody is really ahead”, he says. “It’s

a very young industry, it’s got law firms’ attention early

in its hype cycle, so this may be an area where we’re

going to be innovators, rather than just reinventing

what our clients and other companies do. With AI and

cognitive computing, we have a chance of running,

not at the front of the pack, but not very far behind the

front of the pack. It remains to be seen how good a job

we do using this technology in our practices.”

Courter is looking “very seriously” at AI: the firm

is seeking to use AI approaches in its billing system,

in document review and in contract analysis. “We have

many other ideas that we are pursuing related to AI,” he

reveals, “from uses of AI in the provision of legal services, to

something that I’m very interested in, which is the uses of true

machine learning in the efficient delivery of law firm operations.”

However, he concedes that AI “will force law firms to change and

adapt” and this may require fewer lawyers “in the longer term”.

Using technology, Courter explains, enables the firm to focus on

connecting with clients – anywhere, anytime. In collaboration and

knowledge sharing, the real innovation is in proprietary systems

such as Baker & McKenzie Online, an extranet which, among other

features, allows clients to access a document simultaneously with

lawyers, to co-edit it and to see each other’s edits.

There are also knowledge-sharing products developed by the

firm, including the FT Innovation Award-winning Global Merger

and Acquisition Planner. This helps companies doing multi-

jurisdictional acquisitions to analyse competition and antitrust

rules across jurisdictions.

“Clients need to be getting answers to questions very quickly

and technology is a great enabler. They want to get the same

level of service and the same capabilities and seamless delivery of

service, wherever they are being served by Baker & McKenzie. We

do a lot of things to try and make sure that is the client experience.

And yes, you absolutely need to be innovative in order to give the

clients what they require and what they deserve.”

Craig Courter, global chief operating officer, Baker & McKenzie

Connecting with clients via tech

AI will force law firms to change and adapt and this may

require fewer lawyers in the longer term



So what are the expectations? “Clients expect us to be innovative

in legal knowledge, legal arguments, legal theories and the practice

of law. We are very innovative in that. Clients also want us to be

innovative in service delivery as well, because they’re under huge

cost pressures and we need to be as innovative as we can to try to

assist them: to do it better, faster and cheaper.”

He identifies the firm’s Global Services Manila, a shared services

centre established in 2000, as being extremely innovative –

the first of its kind. “That allowed us to do a lot more with less

dollar resources.” It was followed last year by an additional centre

in Belfast, adding legal services to the firm’s shared services

offerings, with more than 850 staff in Manila

and Belfast approaching 200.

Courter is keen to develop a culture

of innovation among young lawyers and

professional staff. “A leader in an innovative

organisation needs to be open to ideas that

aren’t his or hers – that they can just help

others develop,” he says. “Young lawyers

are already innovators and what we have to

do is pay attention to them. We have some

very specific examples of that, including AI-

based technology that one of our associates has

developed. I can’t talk about the detail now but we

are very encouraging of that.”

Many lawyers toward the end of their career, he

suggests, “can run Word, do email, and otherwise make

their computer work”. But he adds: “They really don’t have

an intuitive sense for why the computer works that way.” He

points, by contrast, to: “The generation of lawyers that we’re

hiring now: they’ve always had computers, they understand how

they operate. It’s just second nature to them, they know how to

do it. They may not be programmers but they have probably done

some programming in their career and they say not only, ‘boy, I

am frustrated because this is really inefficient’, but they are also

able to say: ‘here’s a better way to do it’.”

To remain innovative, he admits, “is really hard”, adding: “Because

with the COO hat on, you’re torn between efficiency in operations

and innovation. And if you’re designing an organisation to be

innovative, you would design it differently than one that needed to

be ruthlessly efficient. If we wanted to truly be innovative in every

aspect, then we would probably have more groups of people who

were allowed to work on ideas independently, without significant

standards, and let a thousand flowers bloom. There’s a little bit of

tension in how you need to run an organisation to be efficient and

how you want to make sure you are at least getting some level of

innovation in what you’re doing.”

The generation of lawyers that we’re hiring now: they’ve always had computers,

they understand how they operate. It’s just second

nature to them



Andrew Arruda describes himself as an entrepreneur, strategist

and leader, with nearly a decade of experience in the legal

industry. He is also a licensed attorney, who “knows the ins and

outs of the legal profession and aims to forever change the way

legal services are delivered”.

He plans to do this through ROSS Intelligence, which he co-

founded in 2014. ROSS is “the world’s first artificially intelligent

attorney”, built using IBM’s Watson. It understands natural

language legal questions and provides expert answers instantly,

along with other relevant information – cutting down

substantially on legal research time and energy.

Prior to ROSS Intelligence, Arruda worked at Toronto litigation

boutique, Azevedo & Nelson, and with the Canadian Department

of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development in Portugal. But in

the last year, ROSS and Arruda have been featured everywhere

from the BBC to CNBC, The New York Times to The Financial

Times.

So how did ROSS start out? “The genesis wasn’t from me,” says

Arruda. “It came originally from a Texan, Jimoh Ovbiagele, who

was transferred to the University of Toronto, which has arguably

the world’s leading AI department. He called me one day and

said: ‘what do you think about building a system that would

bring the power of AI to the law and that would allow lawyers to

instantly update the information that they need to do their job?’

“I ended up leaving my law firm. We moved into a basement

and maxed out our credit cards to fund our early days.” They

started in Toronto, where “they got a ton of interest from the

law firms”, says Arruda, before moving to Palo Alto in mid-

2015, where they got some funding help from Y

Combinator – early funders to Airbnb among

others.

ROSS bankruptcy was the first product.

“There are tight guidelines and bankruptcy

is a perfect way to show ROSS can be used

in a pinch,” says Arruda. Like humans,

it can learn and contextualise, getting

smarter the more you use it.

He explains: “ROSS harnesses

the power of natural language

processing. When a user asks

a (hypothetical) legal research

question, just as they would ask

a lawyer, it analyses, compares

and contrasts the words and

sees the relationships those

words have on each other, much

like humans do, and therefore

it uncovers the intent of the

question itself.”

ROSS can therefore

“understand what you’re asking,

and it’s trying to aim at the why

you’re asking it”. After layering

on machine learning, it continues

to learn – “essentially try to mimic

the way we as humans learn things”.

As to how ROSS has the capacity

to draw inferences and formulate

hypotheses, the answer, says Arruda,

“is a very complicated process that uses

hundreds of different algorithms”. He adds:

“The way to boil that down simply: what it is

trying to do is decipher different things and add

on a different weighting system.” Going back to the

hypothetical question, “it brings back the passages of

law it feels most confident answer your question”.

Unlike some gloomy forecasters who predict AI will

ultimately mean the end of lawyers, Arruda thinks that it “will

actually make humans more human”.

He sees ROSS and AI more broadly “as a really powerful tool for

positive change in society”, because it will save money on legal

ROSS is ‘the world’s first artificially intelligent

attorney’...it understands natural language legal questions and

provides expert answers instantly

Andrew Arruda, co-founder, ROSS Intelligence

Changing legal services delivery



research time. He points

to the 80% of Americans

“who if they need a

lawyer, can’t afford one”.

As a legal tool, ROSS

is sold as a cost and

time saver. It is being

rapidly developed

and has already been

tested by hundreds of

lawyers in multiple

law firms. Baker

Hostetler was one of

the first big names to

sign up, followed more

recently by Latham &

Watkins.

In terms of cost, there

is no published fixed

tariff. But Arruda is keen

to point out: “We made

Ross to be able to be used

by solo practitioners, small,

medium and large law firms –

so it’s very affordable. We like to

peg the monthly charge at roughly

what it would cost for an hour of a

lawyer’s time on average, with the logic

that using Ross is going to be saving you

countless hours a month.”

For a technical innovation to work

commercially, the market has to buy. Arruda is

confident that they will: “I like to think that ROSS will

certainly become a ubiquitous piece of technology for the law

firms that exist in the future. Our goal right now is to put ROSS

into the hands of every lawyer across the world.”

Arruda knows the ins and outs of the legal

profession and aims to forever change the way

legal services are delivered



Ranajoy Basu is a man on a mission: to create

a positive social impact around the world

and particularly in emerging markets

including India, his country of birth,

using the law as an instrument

of innovation. Basu is a partner

in structured finance at Reed

Smith in London and also

heads the firm’s Social Impact

Finance Group. Prior to joining

Reed Smith, he worked at

Allen & Overy and Berwin

Leighton Paisner.

“The idea of social impact

financing came through a

transaction, BOLD (Blueorchard

Loans for Development),” he says.

“It was innovative, the first of its kind,

and at the time in 2007, it went on to

win several awards for Deal of the Year,

because it was the first rated securitisation of

microfinance transactions.”

Through this experience, Basu realised that he could apply

his legal expertise from capital markets and structured finance

transactions in creating social impact. “There is a great need for

unlocking private capital towards funding social impact projects

in areas of the world where such funding is vital,” he explains.

Before joining Reed Smith in 2012, he became involved in

several transactions similar to BOLD. Once at the firm, and with

support from senior management, he established the Social

Impact Finance Group across the firm’s many offices, where a team

of lawyers across a number of practice areas advise on numerous

social impact projects, including the recent Educate Girls Project,

which is a landmark transaction on cross-border impact funding

in the education sector.

Up until that point, social impact bonds had always been

structured on a domestic basis. The challenge was to get funding

across jurisdictions. Basu was driven by the need “to structure

something innovative, which targeted the education needs of more

than 20,000 girls in remote parts of India, such as Rajasthan”.

Advising on the structuring, documentation, regulation and

tax were key. In a project that started at the end of 2013 and

completed 18 months later, “the key innovative element”, explains

Basu, “was ensuring that the social impact linked

back to the payment that the investors get”.

That repayment would be contingent on

specified outcomes being achieved.

There were three elements

that were key in relation to this

innovative transaction: (i) the

structuring of the payment

mechanics; (ii) the parameters

of success or the success

metrics that would be applied

to evaluate the level of positive

impact achieved by the projects;

and (iii) the level of information

that would be available in India

for the impact evaluators to be

able to measure the outcome. It was

also critical that all of these aspects

were clearly documented under a robust

legal framework. Through an exhaustive,

complex and creative process, the first cross-

border development impact bond succeeded, with the

investment being raised from UBS Optimus Foundation.

“It is encouraging to see that the first-year results of the project

have been positive and also that the structural framework

developed by Instiglio, UBS Optimus and CIFF, is holding up in its

application on the ground,” says Basu.

“In terms of innovation, as a lawyer, the most exciting aspect and

the challenge is to be able to deliver a relatively simple solution to

our clients who are looking at developing a financing framework,

where the social impact is closely linked to every aspect of the

transaction. It is hoped that the Educate Girls Project will be the

first of many such transactions delivering positive change for the

education of children.”

In rethinking traditional models of social impact, thanks to

Basu, Reed Smith is continuing to innovate. The firm now has

almost 150 people in finance, tax, regulatory and corporate across

its office network as part of the Social Impact Finance Group.

“Over the last few years, our Social Impact Finance Group has

evolved into a mainstream practice area for us, which is what

we wanted to build right from the beginning. The social impact

finance market is growing rapidly and we are very excited to be

part of these innovative transactions,” he says.

Ranajoy Basu, partner, Reed Smith

Making an impact



In terms of innovation, the most exciting aspect is to be able to deliver a relatively simple solution to our clients...

where the social impact is closely linked to every aspect of

the transaction



Wim Dejonghe joined Allen & Overy as a partner in 2001, having

previously been a partner at Loeff Claeys Verbeke. In May, he

became A&O’s senior partner. Before that, he was global

managing partner of the firm for eight years.

“I see my role more as a facilitator and a challenger,”

he says. “A facilitator for the people who come

up with innovative ideas and a challenger for

those who don’t.” He points to a range of new

products, services and technology at A&O that

“either improve delivery of legal services or

make it more efficient”. He explains: “If you

look at it with some perspective, in the

end it’s about the delivery model and the

processes around it.”

Technology, he suggests, is “probably

overrated” and “the process piece

is underrated, because in the end

technology allows you to improve the

way you deliver services to the client

by introducing more efficiencies and

taking out human error and replacing

it by technology”.

He points to several initiatives:

the firm’s new online legal services

platform Aosphere, the legal services

centre in Belfast, and Peerpoint. Aosphere

is an online monthly subscription service

for A&O clients, offering 10 different

products targeted at financial institutions:

there are currently about 10,000 individual

users. Dejonghe cites the example of shareholder

disclosure products.

“Each time you buy or sell shares, you have disclosure

obligations under a wide range of legislation in different

jurisdictions,” he says. “That can mean up to 70 disclosure

obligations on any given transaction. Aosphere delivers an

online tool where you answer five to 10 questions, depending on

the complexity, and it will then automatically either send the

notifications that you need to send online, deliver the documents

that you have to sign to send, or tell you what disclosure obligations

you have. For clients, it is quick, cost effective and provides

certainty that it’s up to date. The funds industry, for example, is

very interested.”

Facilitator and challengerWim Dejonghe, senior partner, Allen & Overy

The success of the Belfast launch in 2011 is covered in David

Morley’s profile: the office now has 80 lawyers on client work and

total staff of about 450, making it the firm’s second largest office

after London. “We were lucky with one or two high profile deals



to start with, and the rest is history,” says Dejonghe. “We now

have around 60% of our partners using our Belfast legal services.”

He would like it to grow further but “our building is full”.

Another key innovation steered by Dejonghe is Peerpoint,

which enlists the firm’s alumni to assist on projects in periods

of high demand. It has been operating in the UK since late 2013

and was launched in Hong Kong last year. It now has approaching

160 lawyers.

“Peerpoint is made up of experienced senior lawyers,” explains

Dejonghe, “who, for whatever reasons, don’t want to work full

time but have specific experience or knowledge. They work on a

project basis, either within A&O or with our clients. We call them

in to work on a project, typically for between three months and a

year, either sitting with us or with clients.

“Peerpoint caters for a specific client need, it deals with

fluctuations in demand within A&O, and it caters to

individual needs for individual lawyers, who don’t want to

work long hours every day. The talent pool is vast: young

women with children, musicians, people who want to

try a writing career. Lots of very interesting people who

have a wider view of the world but are bloody good

lawyers.”

Although A&O already has 95 US-qualified partners

and just under 400 US-qualified lawyers around the

world, Dejonghe agrees that “innovations like this

will help us crack the US market and build our US

practice”.

Dejonghe also believes that having different

delivery models such as Peerpoint, in combination

with the traditional model, enables A&O to gain

market share. “For many of the bigger projects we get

in from clients,” he says, “we deliver legal services and

advice through a combination of Belfast, Peerpoint,

technology and the traditional law firm. The fact that

you can offer that under one brand, one insurance, one

reputation, is what is attractive to clients.”

He concedes that if you process map all the legal work

that A&O does, some of it is commoditised. “There’s still

a denial in the industry,” he says, “that we’re all doing that.

Every quality firm claims that they’re only doing the highest

complexity work, which is true, but all of the highest complexity

work also contains an element of commoditised services. As long

as you deny that is part of what you offer, you will not think

about how you can deliver more effectively.”

Dejonghe was instrumental in the highly innovative

MarginMatrix, a new digital derivatives compliance system

launched by A&O in June. MarginMatrix helps major banks deal

with new regulatory requirements that came into force for the

$500tn over-the-counter derivatives market from 1 September

2016. The system is being deployed as an end-to-end managed

service in collaboration with Deloitte, which manages and

resources the client outreach and counterparty negotiation

process.

“Every country has introduced the rules in a slightly different

way, which means the banks have a big problem: they need to

renegotiate all these agreements,” says Dejonghe. “Rather than

renegotiating them one by one and then have a legal opinion,

what we have done is to preload the new requirements on the

software that we have developed internally.

“We’ve gone out to the banks and said: you’re subject to

Singapore, HK, EU and US law, this software will give you the

margin within which you have to renegotiate those agreements.

So any negotiator can go to their counterparties, plug in the

data of his negotiation into the software and it will give a green

number or a red light. You don’t need the lawyer any more to

negotiate.”

As a technical and commercial innovation, it has been very

successful. “We went to sell it to the banks and it sold out,” says

Dejonghe. “I cannot disclose the names but we’ve sold it to all the

major banks around the world. At this stage, I don’t think there

is a product available that competes. It reverses the process: by

putting legal advice in the system first and then you negotiate

agreements within the system, rather than negotiate a contract

and then go for legal advice and ask whether it’s fine.”

Dejonghe sees the wider development of innovation within

A&O as key: “Not all our lawyers are innovators. I don’t come

up with all these great ideas myself. But what you do is you

encourage. In any law firm there are probably 5-10% of lawyers

that come up with ideas. It’s a matter of encouraging them,

freeing them up and saying: this is a brilliant idea, let’s take the

risk, investigate further, invest a bit, get some technology, do a

dry run in the market to see whether there’s any appetite.

“And if it fails, it fails. It’s been good marketing. If you go to

clients with an idea and it doesn’t work, you still demonstrate

that you’ve been thinking about their problems; you’re not just

waiting for their phonecall to share a problem with you, you’re

going proactively out into the market.”

In any law firm there are probably 5-10% of lawyers

that come up with ideas. It’s a matter of encouraging them,

freeing them up and saying: this is a brilliant idea, let’s

take the risk



Stuart Whittle is not unique but he is

unusual: a law firm partner who

moved full time into IT and, since

2010, a member of Weightmans’

management board. He now

has more than a decade’s

experience as an innovative

IT director at Weightmans.

This dual perspective

gives him a valuable

understanding of what

innovation means in

practice.

His interest in IT

started as a trainee

solicitor: “The firm was

acting on a huge class

action for various law firms

arising out of equity release

mortgages,” says Whittle.

“Another firm presented us with

a Microsoft Access 1995 database to

help manage the litigation: beautifully

crafted but we couldn’t get it to work for us.

“My IT partner said: do you know anything

about IT? To which the answer was: not really. So he sent

me on a lengthy Microsoft Access course – at the time, a radical

thing to do. I then pulled this database apart and put it back

together again. The frustration I’ve always had with the law is

there are lots of right answers and you’re never quite sure whether

you’ve got the right one. In IT, it either works or it doesn’t, or it

works elegantly or it doesn’t.”

Whittle spent 10 years as a practising lawyer before moving

full time into IT. “In my naive world as a lawyer, I was delivering

services to clients: what I thought were the things the client

wanted. When I got into IT – perspective is a wonderful thing

– I quickly discovered that the suppliers I valued were those that

knew more about my business than I did, the ones who understood

I had a problem and made it go away.”

Whittle ran the IT department for five years and then assumed

responsibility for the firm’s operational functions: marketing,

HR, facilities, projects, risk and business processing engineering.

After learning “some hard lessons in case management systems”,

he spent a year designing and rolling out basic

workflows, making sure everybody in the

firm was using the system. “We were

early adopters of case management

technology,” he says.

These internal systems have

since progressed much further:

“If the client wants to see

management information

that we collect,” Whittle

explains, “we can show

them all the documents

in the systems plus the

financial information and

aggregate it at a portfolio

level.” This is supplemented

by providing clients with

dashboards that help them

derive meaning from the data.

Whittle has ensured that all

systems have been fully integrated

as a result of mergers by Weightmans.

But being innovative for clients has been

paramount: “The thing that drives lawyers is

clients. Many of the changes we have introduced

have been at the behest of a particular client. Having then

used that in one area and shown that it works, we have rolled it

out elsewhere.”

His main challenge in being innovative? “Time. We don’t lack

great ideas but like many law firms, we are a victim: the urgent

stuff always takes priority.”

He is “genuinely interested” in what AI might do. “There’s a

lot of potential, particularly if you can do something with this

huge corpus of information that my firm has: that combination of

structured and unstructured data, to derive patterns and meaning

from it and link that unstructured data to structured data. There

is something very powerful there. But it’s a big if.”

Persuading lawyers to invest time (and money) is best done by

results, as he explains: “By definition, lawyers are very good at

telling you all the reasons why something won’t work. Whatever

you suggest isn’t ever going to be perfect. But if you can get a

partner talking about how they’ve done something different for a

client, that’s what gets other partners interested.”

Stuart Whittle, IT director, Weightmans

Releasing the power of big data



If you can get a partner talking about how they’ve done something different for a client,

that’s what gets other partners interested



Searching for the game changerMike Rebeiro, global head of technology and innovation, Norton Rose Fulbright

As global head of technology and innovation at Norton

Rose Fulbright (NRF), Mike Rebeiro advises on large-scale IT

and business process outsourcing, including cross-border

transactions, IT procurement, data privacy and digital projects

for both the public and private sectors. Innovation is therefore in

his DNA.

Rebeiro offers a considered view on how innovation is best

applied: “Law firms have been good at innovation but they

haven’t necessarily connected innovation to technology-enabled

innovation. There are two different things. The legal profession

generally has focused its innovation on doing what it does better,

but it hasn’t focused its efforts on what I would call disruptive

innovation.

“That is the challenge for law firms now because in terms of

disruptive innovation, we are in a place where business model

disruption is happening all around us. It’s affecting every industry

that we work for and it is going to affect the legal services market.

That business model disruption means that we are susceptible to

disruption from non-traditional legal players.”

He defines the latter as those who “really invest heavily in

technology and actually understand how that they can use

technology, big data analytics and AI to disrupt what we do”.

Rebeiro believes: “Innovation happens when you have intelligent

people working collaboratively together rather than on their own

– we’re trying to get people to do that.” Part of the problem with

law firms, he suggests, is: “They expect that if they’re going to

invest in a project, they expect that project to work first time but

innovation isn’t always successful. Lawyers need to recognise that

if we invest in innovation, nine times out of 10, it won’t

be a success. But the one time out of 10 that it will be

a success may be a game changer. That’s a different

mindset.”

NRF is trying to inculcate innovation and

encourage innovative thinking through every

layer of the firm but especially in the next

generation of younger lawyers, believing that is

where innovation can really thrive.

“The problem,” says Rebeiro, “is that lawyers

tend to be very conservative in their approach

to life. The things that we can learn from those

who are at the cutting edge is the willingness

to fail, to have that entrepreneurial spirit and

that startup feeling. Not many lawyers working

in private practice have ever worked in a startup

and we need to get that startup culture into

our approach to innovation.” Part of this lies

in increasing their risk appetite, “but not taking

risk for the sake of taking risk”, he adds.

Rebeiro identifies technology as a process: law

firms gradually moving into investment in back-

office technology, then into the middle and front

offices.

“But we’re still way off from the front office: looking

at technology replacing the role of some of the things that

we do now,” he says, pointing to “an element of tasks that

we regard as high value at the moment, which will over time

become more commoditised and, as that happens, they become

susceptible to technology implementation and technology change.”

Law firms are notoriously late adopters because “they are reticent

to invest in technology”, argues Rebeiro. “So the profession invests

in the back-office infrastructure stuff. But that’s not exciting

technology; it’s not transformative technology.” While NRF is also

investing heavily in its back-office technology, the firm’s current

priority is investing in the front office.

Although he identifies due diligence process and contract drafting

as being particularly susceptible to imminent AI applications,

Rebeiro sees AI as nascent technology: “It’s a bit like the driverless

car: you won’t go from having a fully piloted or driven car to a

driverless car overnight, but you’ll get to the tipping point where

there will be more fully driverless cars on the road by a certain date

than there will be driving cars. That will happen with AI as well.

If you think of a law firm, the amount of data they own,

that’s where the value is, that’s where the diamonds in the

rough can be found



“We’re already seeing some AI applications in use. But it will

become far more interesting when you combine AI with big data

and predictive analytics, because we’ll be able to use big data and AI

to have a much more sophisticated approach to risk.”

In the medium term, Rebeiro suggests that big data analytics will

be critical. “If you think of a law firm, the amount of data they

own, that’s where the value is, that’s where the diamonds in the

rough can be found,” he says. “Being able to use big data analytics

to analyse risk appetite and to see how

the risk appetite landscape is changing;

being able to identify what really is

important to negotiate and what isn’t

important to negotiate. That’s where

the real value comes. It’s where the

investment dollars should go.”

Digital strategy is another key

priority for NRF: “If you don’t have a

digital strategy, I don’t think you’re

going to be around in five years’ time,”

says Rebeiro. “You need to look at digital

holistically within the business: anything

from the back office through to social

media, the AI app, search engine, data

streaming, data acquisition. Perhaps a better

way of putting it is having a data strategy as

well as a digital strategy.”

In finding out about what other law firms are

doing, Rebeiro is disinterested: “I’m much more

interested in what other business sectors are doing: as a

profession we have much more to learn from other industry

sectors than we do from looking at each other,” he says. “We

are, as an industry, analogue – and the world is digital.”

In terms of business model disruption, he points to what is

happening in automobile automation, the internet of things, big

data predictive analytics and the operation of Uber and Airbnb:

“We have much more to learn from the sharing economy than we

do by looking at what other professional services firms are doing,”

he says.

When it comes to encouraging innovation within NRF, Rebeiro

argues for incentivising innovation. “Traditionally, lawyers are

incentivised by how many hours they bill – that model has to

go. You have to incentivise people far more by their contribution

to the business; and innovation needs to be seen as part of a key

contribution to the business.”

We are, as an industry, analogue – and the world

is digital



When David Morley started at Allen & Overy (A&O) in 1980,

there were 35 partners and just one office. Annual billings were

around £8m. By the time he retired in April, after eight years

as senior partner and a further five years as managing partner,

the firm had 530 partners across its network of 44 offices in 31

countries. Its latest annual revenues were £1.28bn.

“I spent my whole career with one firm, so there must be

something about it that worked for me, either that or a complete

lack of imagination,” says Morley. A natural restlessness drove

him to innovate: “I never felt that whatever we were doing could

ever be perfect. As a firm, we had quite a healthy culture. But no

matter how well we did, we always questioned ourselves as to

whether we could do it better. There was a constant search for a

better way of doing something better, to improve. That’s been a

driving motivation for me all through my life.”

Among A&O’s groundbreaking innovations was the decision

in July 2011 to open a Belfast office, comprising the firm’s Legal

Services Centre and Support Services Centre. Morley was then

senior partner (chairman) and Wim Dejonghe managing partner

(CEO). David credits Dejonghe with being the driving force

behind the Belfast move and Peerpoint (see Dejonghe’s profile on

page 16). “We worked very closely together and saw the world in

much the same way. Two heads are often better than one when

driving forward change.”’

The inspiration, he suggests, was: “A recognition that we’d

moved into a tougher, lower growth environment – we needed

to search for ways in which we could run our operations more

efficiently and more cost effectively. We decided to completely

reimagine the way we were doing things in the back office and

reconstruct it. We needed to move out of London because it didn’t

make sense any longer to have all your back office situated in the

heart of one of the most expensive cities in the world.”

But the Belfast decision wasn’t just about cost, he says. “It

was also about improving our processes so we could streamline

things. Over the years, all organisations, they’re like boats that

sit in the sea: they gather barnacles, they lose that racing edge –

you need to wax and polish them, you need to look after them,

you need to have another look at what you need to do to keep

your speed up.”

Immediately before the Belfast launch was due to go public,

there was a crisis of confidence: “We’d spent over a year doing all

the work – a huge effort. But the night before we were due to

announce it, Wim came into my room and said: ‘We’re going to

have to cancel this because there’s just too much opposition,

too many people telling us where we’re going wrong and

why it won’t work.’

“We both knew there was absolutely no way we were

not going to go ahead with it. But whenever you do

anything new, particularly in the law, it unsettles

and confounds people. This is part of the key to

successful innovation: getting the balance right

between listening to the sceptics, the naysayers and

the doomsters – who sometimes can be right – but

not being overwhelmed by them, and being able to

make progress and move things forward even in the

teeth of sometimes quite entrenched opposition.”

Morley puts the innovation of Belfast into context:

“A number of firms ended up doing similar things

but ours did catch the eye in the way that we did it,

the scale that we did it, the speed that we did it and

the way we executed it. That’s a really important point

that often gets lost. Many people think that innovation

is about dreaming up wacky ideas or inventing the next

iPad, but a lot of it is in the execution: being able to turn

those ideas into something practical that works and that

sticks.” Slightly amended, he quotes an old army phrase: prior

preparation prevents particularly poor performance.

Two other innovations championed by Morley (and Dejonghe)

are worthy of note. The first is Peerpoint: A&O’s global, flexible

resourcing business. It provides the opportunity for experienced,

top-tier lawyers to work as consultants on contract in high

quality legal placements with A&O teams and for clients directly.

“It started from realising that the market was changing: a shift

in attitudes among clients and lawyers as to the ways in which

people might work. The main driver was thinking about how

could we make this boat go faster, how could we streamline our

processes, how could we produce a better result for the client and

for the firm in terms of how we manage our resources.”

Again, there was scepticism: worries about quality control and

how A&O would train its junior lawyers if it took off. “Lots of

very valid concerns,” says Morley. To address the quality issue,

Peerpoint began with only A&O alumni. “That is often a good

way of approaching innovation: to start in a manageable way

that addresses the main criticisms and enables you to get the

thing off the ground and demonstrate that the model works.”

When the demand from clients became evident, “we started

David Morley, former senior partner, Allen & Overy

Confounding the sceptics



Morley describes PRIME as “a

nationwide initiative” – almost 100 law

firms across the UK have joined since

it was started. “Its goal,” he explains,

”is to provide quality work experience

to young people from less privileged

backgrounds. That is key because

quality work experience is the new jobs

currency.”

“Those firms together have provided

quality work experience to more than

3,000 young people who would almost

certainly not otherwise have had that

opportunity. A&O kicked it all off but it’s the

collective effort of the firms that joined the

scheme that has made the difference. Finding

a format that enabled every firm to agree upon a

common approach was the real innovation.”

The motivation for both schemes was personal:

“I went to a state school in Chester,” says Morley. “I just

couldn’t believe, [as] somebody coming from an ordinary

background, with parents earning average or below average

wages, [that] it was actually getting harder to enter the profession

than when I entered 35 years ago. That seemed to me to be bad

for individuals, bad for society and bad for the profession as a

whole. The profession definitely needs a diversity of talent; not

just gender and all of those things, but also background.”

He met many people who felt the same way, so: “It seemed to

be a concrete, practical step that we could take. It doesn’t answer

every question nor solve every problem, but there’s only so much

you can do, and that you can ask the business to do, in helping

with these social initiatives. This seemed like a very practical way

where we could really help – by offering practical assistance to

people who might otherwise not have had it and getting people

into the profession who might otherwise not have done so.”

For further information, please see: dhmorley.com

experimenting, putting people into clients and charging them”,

says Morley. “Once the model was proven, people recognised

it and partners started using it, then we were able to persuade

people that we could go beyond the A&O alumni and recruit

other highly qualified people.” Today, roughly half of Peerpoint’s

lawyers are A&O alumni.

Morley’s second innovation has been as a founding member

of PRIME, which emerged from Smart Start, the firm’s initiative

to give Year 12 students from non-privileged backgrounds the

chance to spend a week at A&O offices and gain a real insight into

the world of business.

Whenever you do anything new, particularly in the law, it unsettles and confounds

people. This is part of the key to successful

innovation



Bringing crowdfunding to the lawJulia Salasky, founder, CrowdJustice

Entrepreneur, lawyer and innovator –

34-year-old Julia Salasky only founded

CrowdJustice last year. But since

then, the first UK crowdfunding

site dedicated to increasing

access to justice has funded

multiple cases, several of them

prominent causes of national

significance. Formerly

a UN lawyer working

on intergovernmental

negotiations and online

dispute resolution, and

before that a Linklaters

associate, Salasky conceived

of fusing crowdfunding

with litigation that has a

public interest or that affects

communities.

“On the one hand, I saw the rise of

petition sites and the way that crowdfunding

had become mainstream,” she explains, “and

on the other, a major gap between people who need to

access the legal system and those who can afford to do so. It just

seemed like an obvious interception.” She points to: “A continued

rise in online activism: people who really want to take part in

issues that affect them, their community, people they care about,

and they often feel helpless in being able to do so.”

Salasky was careful to launch in a way

that “specifically accommodates the legal

compliance and regulatory issues that

lawyers, law firms and people funding

litigation encounter”. CrowdJustice

does a lot of regulatory checks

behind the scenes but in many

ways it operates much like any

conventional crowdfunding

page: set a target and make

your case. CrowdJustice gives

the tools to help users to

promote it to the right people

and to build a community

around the case. If the target is

reached, 93.5% of funds raised

goes to cover fees, 5% goes to

CrowdJustice and 1.4% to payment

processor fees. The average donation is

£35 and just under 90% of cases hit their

target funding level.

One of their first big cases was Joint Enterprise

Not Guilty by Association (JENGbA), a campaign group

for family members fighting for justice on behalf of those

imprisoned under the law of joint enterprise. In February

2016, JENGbA used CrowdJustice to fund its intervention in the

Supreme Court – the first ever to be crowdfunded at the highest

level – and was successful in changing the law, which had been

“wrongly interpreted for 30 years”, according to Lord Neuberger,

president of the Supreme Court.

‘The JENGbA case was a powerful way of people coming

together to create real change through the law,” says Salasky.

Publicity generated by such high profile cases creates “a virtuous

circle”, she explains. “The more people who know about a case,

the more they are likely to give and to engage with different

issues. There’s a huge cross-fertilisation, so people who give to

one case may well give to another.”

Following the Chilcot report, the Iraq War Families Campaign

Group, which represents the families of the 179 British

servicemen and women killed in the conflict, raised £150,000

on CrowdJustice. They are seeking to “bring to justice those

responsible for the war”. Donors also funded a legal bid by

Labour party members over a vote in the leadership election.

JENGbA used CrowdJustice to fund

its intervention in the Supreme Court – the first ever to be

crowdfunded at the highest level – and was successful in

changing the law



CrowdJjustice has seen cases from firms such as Bindmans,

Leigh Day and Irwin Mitchell.

Many cases on the platform have focused on environmental

and planning issues, like the local residents challenging the

decision to put a permanent cruise liner on the Thames near

Greenwich, because of potential pollution. They have also seen

personal cases where people are trying, for example, to pay for

employment tribunal fees.

“Doing something new in an industry that is naturally

conservative, you have to overcome existing habits and ways

of doing things in a way that benefits everybody,” explains

Salasky. “CrowdJustice enables individuals and community

groups to access the legal system but it’s also a way for lawyers

who can’t afford to take all their cases pro bono to get paid, and

for important legal issues to get heard before the courts. That

benefits society as a whole.”

Surprisingly, there is nothing comparable yet in Canada,

Australia, or her native US – at least nothing quite like the

CrowdJjustice donation-based model. But Salasky has ambitions.

“We’re looking at the US,” she says. “We already have a lot of US

traffic to the site and significant inbound interest from people who

want to crowdfund US cases.” Ideally, expanding into the US would

involve “building local credibility and looking to establish good

relationships with top public interest firms, charities and NGOs”.



“Lawyers are not great at things going wrong or in dealing with

uncertainty. Innovation requires an ability to deal with both,”

says Simon Harper, co-founder of Lawyers On Demand (LOD).

Started in 2007, LOD was Harper’s brainchild (together with

Jonathan Brenner) after eight years as a partner leading the

technology and media team at Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP).

Ever since, LOD has been at the forefront of alternative legal

service providers, creating a new category of business.

In 2012, Harper stepped down from the BLP partnership to spin

out LOD and lead the business full time. Since the spinoff, lawyer

headcount has trebled. Today, it has around 650 freelance lawyers

working with clients operating in the UK and – via its recent merger

with AdventBalance – in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.

At the outset, Harper points to a combination of three things

happening simultaneously as catalysts. First, he highlights: “An

awareness that our large corporate clients were looking for a

different way of doing some of their work, their business as

usual work, which just didn’t make sense for them at £300- £500

per hour.”

The second piece was “more of a hunch”, he says. “People who

didn’t want the traditional route, had got a fantastic CV but just

wanted to work differently. It was something bigger than work-

life balance, a shift in attitude about what people really wanted

from their working life. The hunch was: this wasn’t just a small

group of individuals but a wider group that would be happy to

work that way.”

The third element centred on how people work, the role

of technology, globalisation and the shifting expectations of

the employer-employee relationship. “Perhaps an

openmindedness to how people work, fuelled by

different technology,” says Harper.

In combining three pieces of the puzzle,

“the glue”, he adds, came with LOD creating

“a different sort of legal service”. LOD was in

gestation for a year, launching before the

crisis of 2008-09. “The latent need in the

market was then accelerated,” says Harper,

who had to persuade others to back him:

“Lawyers can do risk but there is an

unwillingness to deal with uncertainty.”

He explains that there are two sides

to the LOD equation that make it work.

“There is the client side and the lawyer

side – because with that offering, the

lawyers who work with LOD have as much

power as the clients do: they can choose

where they work, when they work, how

they work and who they want to work with.”

Harper wanted to “banish the false

perception of lawyers who choose to work

on a project or interim basis as being second

rate”. But arguably his greatest challenge came

from starting LOD within an existing law firm,

although he points to “a hugely helpful approach

from BLP”. Leveraging the BLP brand was “useful”,

but he found that LOD very quickly “built up trust”.

In presenting the LOD brand, he worked hard to

differentiate. He says: “Even how the website or material

looked, we always used the mantra: what wouldn’t a law firm

do?” The key issue in brand differentiation, he explains, was to

retain the quality. “That was about the lawyers we hired and

the people we hired to run the business – to make sure that

whatever we did was shot through with quality.”

As LOD’s success became clear, imitators emerged: “A really

useful reminder that innovation isn’t static,” he says. “In a

changing market you’ve got to keep moving. We’ve got to keep

making sure that what we offer lawyers is the best available,

the most relevant and that we’re providing what they want.”

After the 2012 spinoff, LOD started an “on-call service”,

slightly closer to what law firms provide, so more of a challenge

to the traditional law firm model where clients can use the LOD

Simon Harper, co-founder, Lawyers On Demand

A different sort of legal service

Our large corporate clients were looking for a different way of doing their business as usual work, which

just didn’t make sense for them at £300-£500 per hour



lawyers flexibly on projects. LOD now works with more than 20

law firms, most recently DLA Piper.

This year has seen further innovation at LOD. Internationally,

the Australian merger in March with AdventBalance was

followed by the launch of Spoke in July. An online marketplace

for legal services, Spoke allows businesses or law firms seeking

short-term extra help to hire lawyers

with spare capacity.

“In the way that someone might

use Airbnb,” says Harper, “we felt

people increasingly wanted to find

out more information about the

sorts of lawyers they could work

with in a flexible way – that is

what Spoke is about. There is a

wider group of lawyers that want

to work in this way. For example,

there are quite a few barristers on

there.”

Being an innovator often means

being a disruptor. “It’s something we

enjoy doing as an organisation and

something I enjoy doing to make things

work,” says Harper. “I think it’s important

to be enjoying it and feeling like it’s making

a bit of a difference and also to feel that there’s

some fun in it too.” Although he acknowledges

that big law firms have also innovated, he adds:

“Notably, none of them have created their captive,

LOD-like businesses as separate entities. None of them

spun them out – they sit as captives within the traditional

firm.”

Harper reflects on how far LOD has come in a decade. “One of

the really useful elements of having built a business like LOD

is its agile size and structure,” he says. “What strikes me about

its management structure is that we can react fairly nimbly to

market changes as we see them. We don’t have a partnership

that we need to bring along.”

An avid fan of technology, who loves innovation, he reads

widely on the subject: “I am completely with AI and anyone who

ignores it does so at their peril, but it’s not as if the machines

will take over.”

In the way that someone might use Airbnb, we felt people wanted to find out

more information about the sorts of lawyers they

could work with in a flexible way



Louise Pentland is general counsel at PayPal. Before that, she

was chief legal officer at Nokia from 2008 to 2014, managing

400 lawyers and other professionals in more than 30 countries

– a global team that in 2011 was named Financial Times Most

Innovative In-House Legal Team of the Year. Pentland is a

qualified solicitor in the UK and an active member of the

New York Bar. She is also passionate about innovation.

After studying law and working at a UK law firm, she

“pretty quickly found that environment was a little

suffocating: it stifled innovation and creativity”. She

did her time, “got out at the first opportunity” and

moved in-house – which, she says, was, at that time,

seen as “a softer option, lower paid and what women

do if they want to have a family”. Nevertheless, she

adds: “I was aware of all the stigmas but I was just

drawn to the business world.”

Following a spell at Avon Cosmetics in

Northampton, she was headhunted by Nokia, where

she would spend 16 years. Pentland found “the most

amazing culture when I got to Nokia”, adding: “I

realised it didn’t matter whether you were a man or

a woman. What they valued was what you did. It was

overwhelming because it was so different to what I had

ever seen or imagined in business.”

She was appointed Nokia’s chief legal officer just as the

financial crisis hit in 2008 – responsible for intellectual

property, legal and, later, for government relations. “We were

in a fairly significant downturn; it was a real challenge to keep

people motivated. We had developed some of the best industry

players but our competitors – Apple and Samsung – were getting

stronger. That’s where the best form of innovation came in, where

we had to start getting creative, because we were at serious risk

of losing people that we needed more than ever in a downturn.”

When it came to law firms, she sought out “individual lawyers

who had a good reputation, knew what I needed”, adding: “That’s

Louise Pentland, general counsel, PayPal

Taking responsibility to drive change

The contrast between where we were and where

we are was down to a handful of passionate people, who saw a

problem and wanted to fix it. That’s innovation



to propagate the lethargy in this area, that’s not going to happen

any more. I’ve met with a lot of firms – some are trying and

some are telling me they’re trying. All the big law firms have an

incredible way to go.”

Pentland sees talent and innovation as being inextricably

linked: “Both within the company but also as applicable in the

legal field, as we think about how to develop our people. If you

develop your people and you bring in great, talented mixed teams,

then that’s what sparks innovation. Because innovation isn’t just

something that you can stick in a test tube and come up with. It’s

how you drive people to be the best and the freest they can be, to

allow them to be innovative.”

Having studied workforce innovation in several large US

corporations, including Chevron, Pentland has developed her

thinking about its role in legal services. “There’s this belief that

innovation is a big life-changing event. Some of the qualities that

I look for when I’m hiring lawyers and when I look at examples of

innovation inside – what PayPal’s done even in the time I’ve been

here – and I look at the individuals, they’re just passionate about

what we do and they want to make it better.”

Referring to the recent difficulties PayPal faced over

‘robocalling’, she says: “The contrast between where we were and

where we are was down to a handful of passionate people, who

saw a problem and wanted to fix it. That’s innovation. That’s the

quality, the je ne sais quoi of people’s character. That’s what you

need, that’s what innovators are and they never stop. I’m seeing

that right now. They’re thinking: what’s next and how do we

keep going?

“It’s contagious too. Once you get that first big wave and win,

you want more. That’s what I crave from the in-house team.

Someone who just comes to work, does their job, does a great

job, but doesn’t stop and look out of the window and look around

them, they’re not likely to be innovators. That’s life experience. A

lot of people look for Ivy League, certain law schools or they went

to ‘this’ law firm. Actually, I think people who’ve got great life

experience make great innovators.”

where I probably differ from some other general counsel because

I’m really focused on my in-house lawyers having relationships

with external lawyers but also, really picking lawyers that are

cost effective, don’t compromise on quality and also have a real

understanding of the business and the mindset of the company.”

Pentland developed what she terms “a philosophy” while at

Nokia. “I wasn’t loyal to any one law firm.” That evolved into a

more refined philosophy at PayPal: “There’s a responsibility here

to drive change...because that change isn’t going to be homegrown

in these big law firms – they’ve been at it, quite pathetically,

for years. I still hear from these firms who parade diversity

numbers of 20% or 25%, telling me all the reasons why it’s

hard, instead of focusing on striving for 50%.”

In her general counsel role at PayPal, Pentland sees her

in-house lawyers as a product of their own innovation.

“I have great diversity in my team,” she says. “Men,

women, ethnic backgrounds. We come at things

where we’re culturally raised differently, we look

at problems differently, we look at solutions

differently, and that’s the real mix that you need

for really great decision making.”

Her approach goes further: “One thing I’m very

focused on at PayPal is picking law firms that

really emulate our company’s values – diversity

and inclusion.” It used to be the case, she

suggests, that “you might have to compromise

a little bit”, adding: “There was a perception that

there was a quality deficiency outside the big law

firms. But a lot of these great diversity candidates

have left the big firms because it’s so hard to break

through, the numbers are absolutely pathetic; the

good news is they have voted with their feet.

“Many of these amazingly talented lawyers have

gone off and set up their own firms. I seek them out

because that’s where we’ll really seek to drive change in

law firms that haven’t woken up to what’s needed and what

their clients want, which is much, much, greater diversity. It’s

not about just having statistics: diversity brings better results,

end of discussion. Why wouldn’t you want that?”

In deciding on who she will partner with in the future,

Pentland reveals her thinking: “We’re in the process of contacting

our existing law firms. We’ve sent them all letters to say: we want

you to tell us what you have because we will, in future, be making

our decisions of where we put work based on firms that really do

support and advocate diversity.

“It isn’t meant to be a light switch you turn on and off; but

there are firms showing that they are willing to make changes.

It’s things like: maybe the relationship partner today is a man

but if you tell me you have a succession pipeline of three women,

or two women and a man of colour; then ok, so now I feel like

you’re working to make a change. But to think that I’m just going

There’s a responsibility here to drive change...because

that change isn’t going to be homegrown in these big

law firms



Justin Stock is the managing partner of

Cooley’s London office, which opened in

January 2015 with 55 lawyers – the

largest ever launch by a US firm

not arising from a merger. Stock

started out at Werksmans in

Johannesburg before moving

to Freshfields Bruckhaus

Deringer in London. After

an eight-year spell with

two US firms, he joined

Cooley at the London

launch and has since

grown the office to 80

lawyers. At the British Legal

Awards in 2015, Cooley won

the London Office of the

Year award, with the judges

describing the US firm as the

“winner by a mile”.

Cooley also fares well in several

league tables. At 28th position in

Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work

For, it has been ranked for three years in a row

and is now the number one law firm. Its attraction for

young lawyers is reflected partly in the name: the firm has a very

cool client base – Google, Facebook, SpaceX and Uber, by way of

example. This is underpinned by a strong financial performance.

Cooley recorded a 19% increase in revenues for 2014, and 14% in

2015, making it one of the fastest growing firms on the AmLaw100.

Stock remembered this when getting the call from Cooley: “I

thought: that’s interesting. One of the last big US firms to enter

the market, very much in the tech and life sciences space. I went

along almost on a reconnaissance mission and met Joe Conroy, our

CEO. It was a very good meeting. I quickly saw his vision of what

he wanted to build in London and as a European presence, and it

very much aligned with mine.”

Because a large number of Cooley clients are in Europe, the need

to be in London was self-evident: they were sending too much work

to other law firms and the tech sector, a core focus for Cooley, was

booming in London. But Stock told Conroy: “Please realise it’s not

like opening in another big US city, where most of the companies

would have heard of us, no one in London is going to know who

on earth Cooley is.” Stock now concedes that he

was mistaken: in the UK life sciences space,

among others, the Cooley name has

significant brand recognition.

Following the meeting, Stock

presented Conroy with a business

plan for the office, outlining a

course for the next five years.

“I said it would be great if

we could end up having

around 35% of the revenue

generated by existing firm

clients, essentially US office

clients, because there’s no

point just being a silo. But at

the same time you don’t want

to be a service office.” Stock

got the job – and soon began

building the team and the brand

in London.

Significantly, the office has already

reached a figure of roughly 25% of work

being generated from US clients. “From my

point of view, 25% is a great start; a lot higher than

I expected for the first 18 months,” says Stock.

Cooley has also added more than 25 lawyers to the office since

launch: “We’ve made great strides and we’re not stopping here,” he

adds. “It is a great challenge making significant numbers of lateral

hires, both at the associate and partner level, from different

firms with different cultures. Cooley has a special culture of

collaboration and support that sets it apart from other firms. We

are all focused on maintaining and strengthening it, despite our

rapid growth.”

In a crowded field of US law firms in London – more than

100 – Cooley has a clear USP. “Something which differentiates

us from the many others,” explains Stock. It is based on “a really

powerful reputation in tech and life sciences for commercial,

business-savvy advice”.“To be able to really understand these fast-moving industries, you

have to own those spaces, to truly understand them.” Stock says

that Cooley has a genuine commitment to looking after “not just

the companies, but the whole innovation ecosystem”. As a USP, he

finds that “very exciting”. So, it would appear, do the firm’s clients.

Justin Stock, managing partner, Cooley (London)

Leading the way in tech and life sciences



To be able to really understand these fast-moving

industries, you have to own those spaces, to truly

understand them



and many did not like. So we adopted a model that said: we

need to work through what would normally be put off as

transition after the deal is signed.

“That meant a whole rethinking about what the

contracts were and the type of skillsets that lawyers

need to bring to such a transaction. We wanted

to work through all the details before signing

the agreement. That’s what we did and, after

the Texas Air deal, the practice throughout

the 1990s just exploded: I could not get

enough bodies to do this stuff.” Expanding

internationally, he recruited several lawyers

from a number of English law firms in order to

open a London office and that too “flourished

beyond imagination”, he says.

But innovation also came at a cost. “We

created more legal competition for ourselves

because you couldn’t always keep the contracts

behind the veil,” he says. Boutique consultants

also entered the marketplace.

Zahler’s next innovation was to fight on their

territory: “We decided if consultants were going

to compete with us, we’ll compete head on,” he

says. “So we went about recruiting a set of high level

consultants to join us. They were not a subsidiary

or a separate standalone company that we were in a

relationship with, they were us. Because of legal constraints

in the US, we couldn’t call them partners; we called them

principals [and] they were compensated at levels equivalent to

partners in the firm.”

In creating a consulting group capability within the firm,

the objective was to integrate. “Our product offering changed,”

says Zahler, “in that we explicitly said: we offer both legal and

consulting services within the framework of a law firm. It

continues today and accounts for much of the net new business.

We almost always market jointly: lawyers and consultants

offering a spectrum of professional services that are relevant to

outsourcing.”

Innovation through simplicity was integral to its success. Zahler

and his team wanted to simplify the paperwork – documents

that might be 1,000 pages in length, describing the services,

service levels, pricing methodologies, and terms and conditions

– into a straightforward visual model.

I’ve always been a geek. Technology interests me, so I read things whether they’re

relevant or not

A partner in Pillsbury’s global sourcing practice, Robert Zahler

advises international clients on a wide range of work, with

particular emphasis on sourcing – both information technology

outsourcing and business process outsourcing. The recipient

of several awards, he is recognised as a star individual by

Chambers USA.

As a young lawyer, Zahler spent four years working on the legal

fallout from the Three Mile Island accident, a partial nuclear

meltdown that happened in March 1979, in Pennsylvania – the

most significant accident ever at a US nuclear power plant. “It was

very exciting, very interesting stuff,” he says.

In the late 1980s, Zahler began representing customers in large-

scale IT outsourcing transactions. In 1990, he advised Texas Air

on “what was purported to be a billion-dollar deal over ten years”

to sell part of its airline reservation system and turn over all their

IT operations to Electronic Data Systems (EDS).

In doing the deal, explains Zahler: “We relooked at the whole

concept of outsourcing and what it meant, and we came up with a

model that was fairly different from the original EDS approach.” It

taught him to be innovative. “These types of relationships were of

sufficient value, of sufficient importance and of sufficient length,

that it was worth focusing on them as somewhat different.”

The problem, he explains, was: “Once you announced a deal

and signed the initial contract, the customer lost all leverage. You

could not back out of the transaction (that is, refuse to close if

implementation details were not to the customer’s liking), since

you had already destabilised your workforce by telling them they

were all going to transfer to this vendor, whom they all feared

The geeks shall inherit the earth...Robert Zahler, partner, global sourcing practice, Pillsbury



“We developed a visual methodology in the form of a matrix;

we called it the ValueChain,” he says. “One axis lists slightly more

than 100 standard IT processes, each with a thoughtful description

of what is involved. The other axis is bespoke, uniquely created

for each client: a description of their organisation from an IT

perspective – by geography, or by

line of business. Having created

a matrix with two axes, the

intersection can then be coloured

in: one colour says the supplier

does it and another colour says

the client or customer does it. If

there are multiple suppliers, we

use multiple colours for each.”

As a visual tool, it then becomes

immediately comprehensible

by everyone involved. “We just

wrote some contractual wrappers

around it and that goes in as part of

the contract. Our clients love it, we

love it and to this day, we’re the only

people who do this type of thing.”

Zahler suggests the outsourcing

industry is “almost unique”, explaining:

“For the size and the number of deals that

go on, the amount of litigation with respect

to these deals is trivial, particularly in the US

where everyone sues everyone. There’s hardly any

litigation. The reason for that is because whether it is

my clients who want to sue, or the supplier who might

want to sue us, I say to them: what is it you want to achieve?

And whatever they want to achieve, we can almost always achieve

it in a negotiated settlement.”

To remain innovative 41 years after leaving Harvard Law

School, Zahler reads a lot: “I’ve always been a geek. Technology

interests me, so I read things whether they’re relevant or not.”

And he continues to do rainmaking: “I sell deals and what I’ve

focused on is what I call pathological deals – the transactions

that are in trouble, they need to be renegotiated, restructured,

something done with it. I pick and choose and I get involved

because I think I add real value.”

Our clients love [the ValueChain], we love it and

to this day, we’re the only people who do this type

of thing



Innovation is challenging for lawyers, in large part because of

the way in which they have always conceived their jobs. In a

common law world, you can’t say anything that’s new until you

definitively prove that somebody has already said it before

– that’s called precedent. We are trained and socialised

to law by working for many years to master our craft.

We master it by being taught how the people who

did it before us did it: there is a tradition that

is handed down. I want to emphasise that

has many benefits, but it also makes it more

difficult for lawyers to adapt to change and

changing circumstances.

For many years, lawyers were insulated

from change, in part because lawyers

were in control of both the kind of market

for legal services – meaning lawyers

were the ones who set the terms around

which legal services were delivered, they

decided who could become a lawyer, they

decided what training and education that

person would have – and we were pretty

much in charge of evaluating the quality

of that service, which was evaluated in

reference to how well it conformed to the

way those kinds of services had always

been delivered in the past, according to our

own standards of excellence.

Again, lots of good has come out of that.

But much of that world is changing and it’s

changing not just in the legal world. One of the

things I would emphasise is that, in the past few

years when people have talked about transformation

of the legal profession, it has been a really inward focus

around lawyers and the legal profession.

But of course, what is happening to lawyers is just part of a

much broader set of transformations that are really changing

Keeping pace with changeProfessor David Wilkins: Lester Kissel professor of law, vice-dean for global initiatives on the legal profession, and faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, Harvard Law School; senior research fellow of the American Bar Foundation; fellow of the Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics

A summary of what Professor Wilkins told Dominic Carman in conversation about innovation relating to law firms.



everything about our world. You could think about these in

many different ways but I pick three big-scale forces that are

really affecting us:

(1) The globalisation of economic activity and the important

shift in that activity from what you might think of as the

traditional centres of the North and the West to the new

emerging economies of the South and the East. Not completely,

not totally, but importantly.

(2) The incredible rise – the speed and the sophistication – of

information technology, which is increasing in sophistication at

an ever faster pace.

(3) The blurring together of traditional categories of

organisation and thought that we have used to define our world

– eg public vs private, global vs local, law vs business. It’s not

that these things don’t mean anything anymore but nobody

thinks they are as hermetically sealed as they once were.

All of these things are reshaping the entire world, so

why wouldn’t they reshape the legal profession? The law is a

‘lagging’, not a leading, indicator of change. Lawyers follow

bigger trends in the economy, in society and in politics. That is

what is happening now. It’s happening in things that are quite

tangible to lawyers.

First, there has been a huge reduction in what the economists

would call ‘information asymmetry’ between buyers and

sellers, meaning buyers are way more sophisticated about

what they want, when they want it and how they want it.

This allows them to take things that used to be all

bundled together by the seller – for the seller’s own

benefit – and to unbundle them and to rearrange

these things across increasing global supply chains.

We see this in manufacturing, we see it in finance, we

are now seeing it in professional services in general,

and legal services in particular.

It is being driven by increasingly sophisticated

general counsel, who have internalised the kind of

knowledge that used to only exist in law firms and

now are really driving change in the legal profession.

I say all the time that general counsel are the most

important people who are going to determine what

happens in the legal profession, at least in the corporate

sector.

Second, when you don’t know very much, you have

to evaluate the quality of things by things you can see –

often in advance. These are what I would call the ‘inputs’ of

the product, like the credentials of the person who produced

it, their reputation in the marketplace, or even how many hours

it took to produce – sound familiar?

But the more you know, the less you’re interested in the inputs

of the product and the more you’re interested in the outputs,

which we have seen transform the product markets. That’s why

people can decide, for example, they’d rather take an Uber than

a cab – because they can evaluate the quality of the service,

they read consumer reports.

The last time you went to buy a car you didn’t ask for the

credentials of the chief designer, where it was made, or how many

hours it took to produce – you drove it. And if that wasn’t good

enough, you turned to consumer reports. And if they weren’t

good enough, you looked at its test results. And if that wasn’t

good enough, you went to edmunds.com and asked: what does

somebody with my driving habits think about this car? You’re

trying to approximate the value of the car to you, not the cost of

producing it. What you find is that perhaps a Kia Optima is as

good for you as a Lamborghini or a BMW.

That kind of thinking is now coming into the world of

professional services, where people are having more access to

information and have a better ability to evaluate the quality of

outcomes. It’s not perfect and there will always be a factor of

trust, and it is still a relationship business – particularly for

important work – but the terms of the relationship and what

people are looking for and their ability to evaluate outcomes, has

now shifted much of the power and authority to the buyer, which

we see again in many other parts of our economy.I don’t think we are approaching the end of Big Law, let alone the

end of lawyers, and that is because of another phenomenon that

we often don’t spend enough time on. At the very same time all of

those things mentioned earlier are happening, all those things are

making the world much more complex, dangerous and difficult

for corporate clients. Therefore, their need for sophisticated legal

advice is increasing, not least because of cross-border transactions.

You start doing business in Nigeria, with Chinese financing

and with a business partner who has got a hedge fund in Kuwait,

and you have investors from Germany and France. That is going

to create a very complex transaction, which is then going to be

regulated by 10 or 20 or 30 different entities, all of which have

regulation that is competing and conflicting.

Finally, a couple of things about technology. You can look

at technology from an external/macro point of view at the job

It is being driven by increasingly sophisticated

general counsel, who have internalised the knowledge

that used to only exist in law firms and now are driving

change in the legal profession



market, or you can look at it from an internal

point of view of the legal profession and

practitioners. Sticking with the macro

point of view – it turns out that

technology both reduces jobs and

creates new jobs. It has always

done that. Just look at the

computer or automation

in general. Yes, factory

automation reduces

some manual labour

jobs. It also increases

the jobs for factory

technicians, for service,

for people who create

the machines. It can

also increase demand

for people to sell new

products.

You will see a similarly

mixed effect on the legal

market. Sometimes when

people ask questions about the

employment effects of technology,

the assumption is we have too many

lawyers. That is both true and false at the

same time. We have too many lawyers chasing

the same thing – the same kind of work for the same

kind of salaries. But we know there is a huge amount of the

population completely outside of the legal system – completely

underserved by lawyers. Part of the reason why is because our

model for the delivery of legal services is way too expensive.

One of the things companies like Legal Zoom are doing, is

trying to create a delivery model that uses technology to reduce

the cost, which can increase the demand for legal services –

and that includes demand that can be satisfied by lawyers. The

lawyers may be on a different kind of pricing structure but it

doesn’t mean that it is going to eliminate the need for lawyers.

There is a fallacy around technology that it is something that

only works in one direction – to decrease jobs.

The real question is: what are the legal jobs of the future going

to be and how are people going to prepare for them? Richard

Susskind, in his various books, has tried to sketch out what some

of the future legal jobs are going to be. My guess is that there will

be an even broader range than Susskind has suggested. The real

question is: how do we train and prepare people for those jobs?

The idea that everybody should – as we currently do in the

US – go to four years of undergraduate education plus three

years of law school plus a character and fitness review and take

a Bar exam for three days, to deliver any kind of services that we

might call legal services, is crazy. There is already pressure,

and there will be continuing pressure, on the

regulatory structure around what it takes

to be a lawyer and who can become a

lawyer, or a legal service provider

that will recalibrate the supply to

the demand.

At the other pole, to

think about what does

technology mean for

lawyers. A guy affiliated

with MIT, who studied

the effect of CADCAM

on the engineering

and architecture

professions, came to

my class and he said

something I will never

forget: “Professionals

always think technology

will allow them to do

what they already do

cheaper and faster but in

fact, what technology does is

to fundamentally redefine what it

means to be a professional.”

That is what’s going to happen in the

legal profession. Yes, technology will be used

in the service of efficiency at some level. The deeper

implication is what it means to be a lawyer, what sort of skills you

need to be a good lawyer. How legal services are delivered, how

lawyers work and approach their work is going to be reshaped

as we move into the next phase of this information revolution,

which is doing the same thing, I continue to emphasise, to all of

the different parts of our world. That is, what is happening in law

is not peculiar to law. It’s what is happening to the rest of society

being filtered through the prism of law.

Professionals think technology will allow them to do what they already do cheaper and faster but in

fact, what technology does is to redefine what it means to

be a professional



What is happening in law is not peculiar to law. It’s what is happening to the rest of society

being filtered through the prism of law



Wang Junfeng, founding partner and global chairman, King & Wood Mallesons (China)

Unprecedented breakthrough in Asia

Wang Junfeng is the principal founding partner of King & Wood

Mallesons (China) and is currently global chairman. In 1993,

he founded King & Wood, the first Chinese law firm based on a

western model. When his firm merged with Australian-based

Mallesons Stephen Jaques in 2012, King & Wood Mallesons

became the first global law firm with headquarters in Asia. This

was followed, in 2013, by another merger with London-based SJ

Berwin. In 2016, Wang was described as “most forward thinking”

by the Financial Times when he was named overall winner in the

FT Asia-Pacific Innovative Lawyers awards.

Before setting up King & Wood, Wang worked in the legal

department of the China Council for the Promotion of International

Trade (CCPIT), which serves as the Chinese Chamber of Commerce

for international business and trade. “My position in the legal

department provided me with opportunities to communicate with

foreign counterparts and to get up to speed with international

business and legal affairs,” says Wang. He then spent five years in

the commercial department of the China Global Law Office. Set up

in 1984 under CCPIT, it was the first law firm entitled to engage in

foreign investment and international trade advice in China.

“It was apparent that China needed its own lawyers, not only

with a deep knowledge of Chinese law and practice but also familiar

with international practice,” he says. “I saw the limitations of state-

owned firms and the great potential of private practice. Founding

King & Wood was a bold move in other people’s eyes but a natural

move from my perspective.”

Wang describes the formation of King & Wood as “both inevitable

and opportune”. He explains: “By inevitable, I mean that Chinese

law firms were an inevitable outcome of China’s reform and

progression at that time; by opportune, I mean that, for me, it was

the right time for us to make the move.”

In the early 1990s, after more than a decade of economic

reform and the Open Door policy, “the market economy

started shaping up in China”, says Wang, “and foreign

capital investments gained momentum”. He continues:

“Consequently, there were increasing demands for legal

services, especially in foreign investment. Accompanying

the economic reform, China also restarted building its legal

system. However, at that time, it was still very isolated and

underdeveloped.”

He points out that there were then less than 5,000

lawyers in China and “very few could handle foreign-

related legal work”. He adds: “As foreign capital flooded into

the market, we saw huge demands for foreign investment-

related legal services.” Many international firms followed

their clients, actively setting up representative offices in Beijing

and Shanghai.

China, he says, “needed to establish its own legal profession

with qualified Chinese lawyers practising in the same way as

international firms, to accommodate market demands”. In 1993, the

Chinese Ministry of Justice announced a new policy encouraging

private partnership law firms to be established in addition to state-

owned firms: a groundbreaking reform that helped shape the

modern Chinese legal industry.

In the first few years of King & Wood, “we simply rode the tide

and grew with the Chinese economy”, he says. “China was dynamic,

with significant opportunities presenting themselves on a daily

basis. The vibrant market triggered people’s passion, which in turn

drove the country’s economic growth and rapid development.”

As a private partnership, Wang’s firm had less restrictions and

was quickly able to adapt to market demand. It expanded quickly:

“We targeted more practice areas in many key regions of China in

a very short period of time,” he explains. But the remuneration gap

with international and regional firms remained significant. “For

the first few years, our principal challenge was how to generate

more income so that we could recruit more talent,” he adds.

His experience at the Global Law Office suggested the need to

“learn from international firms, especially from their teamwork,

operational knowhow, culture of sharing and approach to risk

management”. Wang adds: “I believed that those proven systems

must have advantages.” King & Wood began to shape its remuneration

The traditional service model faces tremendous challenges in the internet age.

What we can do is to keep listening to client voices and

to align with the ever-changing market



and management structure more on the international model.

“However,” says Wang, “the core essence of the firm remains very

Chinese, which is fundamental to the firm’s continuing success in

China.”

The firm’s securities team expanded in line with the development

of China’s capital markets. It was involved in the first round of IPOs in

mainland China and then expanded into capital markets, advising

on initial IPOs and refinancings, issuing corporate bonds, M&A of

listed companies, private equity financings and other securities-

related transactions. The team advised issuers and underwriters on

multiple domestic and cross-border securities transactions: many of

them were innovative or landmark deals. It is now one of the largest

top-tier practice groups in the Chinese market.

“We enjoyed enormous media interest after the merger with

Mallesons,” says Wang. “King & Wood followed its clients to provide

them with legal services as they established a global presence. In the

end, client demand led to our merger. Meanwhile, Mallesons

faced some challenges when competing with European and

US firms. Given the backdrop, it was natural for the two

firms to come together and build a unique global law

firm headquartered in Asia.”

The merger created “an unprecedented

breakthrough in Asian legal history,” he adds.

“Undoubtedly, it has brought more value and

what we call ‘the Power of Together’ for

everyone within the firm.” He points to the

firm’s latest Acritas global brand ranking,

up from 15th to 12th, as “an indication

that the merger is recognised as a success

in the legal industry; this is encouraging”.

Following the 2013 merger with SJ

Berwin, Wang says: “We expanded

our global platform to enhance our

competiveness, increase diversity and

share the experience. All these elements

will contribute to the firm’s future

development. Although we may encounter

some challenges as we continue to integrate

our unique east-west combination, we are

encouraged and proud to see the enormous

progress we have made. We are full of confidence

for our future.”

And the firm’s long-term strategy? Wang is

candid: “Frankly speaking, I never deliberately shaped

the firm’s future from day one. What we did was to echo

the voice of time, listen to clients’ needs and learn from the

market. As a traditional Chinese saying goes: ‘doers shall ride

the tide, but not against it’. Our firm’s development has been riding

the tide of time and responding to practical demands in the market.

“We also care about the firm’s financial strength and our people’s

morale. We want our staff to be happy while working with us, in

particular those who work hard to achieve great ideals, ensuring

that their professional achievements are recognised. We also pay

attention to those who face difficulties, by considering how to help

them go forward with us.

“Chairman Mao Zedong once said: ‘A thousand sails pass the

sunken barge, ten thousand saplings spring forth around the dying

tree.’ This poem could resonate with market players and their

development.

“In addition, given the advances in technology, it is difficult

to predict the next steps for the legal industry. Nevertheless, the

traditional service model faces tremendous challenges in the

internet age. What we can do is to keep listening to client voices

and to align with the ever-changing market.”



Forged on the back of Dublin’s role as both a regional and global

hub for tech companies, aircraft finance and pharma businesses,

Irish lawyers have a reputation for being innovative. Among

them, Pádraig Ó Ríordáin stands out as a dealmaker,

former managing partner and a creative lawyer:

both he and his firm, Arthur Cox, have received

numerous accolades for innovation.

Ó Ríordáin qualified as a barrister in Ireland

and then studied law at Harvard. From there,

he joined a Wall Street firm before moving

to Arthur Cox, where he ran its New York

office. “I’m a big believer in just doing

the things that really interest you,” he

says, “and in which you feel you can

contribute because if you do, you do

them well and that tends to lead onto

other things.”

Returning to Ireland in 1989,

Ó Ríordáin became Arthur Cox’s

managing partner by the age of

37 – the youngest ever in the

country at that stage. “The firm

had had a very strong business

presence,” he says, “but not a very

strong management culture.” So he

set about creating one “to release

the energy of every partner across

the firm”, by changing the entire

management structure “to a fully

professionalised international firm”. It

was, he adds, “very much bespoke to suit

the culture of the firm”.

He defines the culture as “a very broad-

based leadership where you try to get the best

out of absolutely everybody in the firm” and, he

adds: “Encourage people to integrate with clients,

understand what they are doing and then take that

experience and be entrepreneurial with it, both within

the firm and externally.”

This has led to some pivotal roles for the firm in cross-border

deals. The most recent example is an innovative deal last year:

Arthur Cox acted for CRH, the Irish construction company, which

acquired certain assets from two multinational companies that

The appliance of skillsPádraig Ó Ríordáin, partner, Arthur Cox



Ireland is a small market that punches significantly above its

weight internationally. For Arthur Cox that brings advantages, as

Ó Ríordáin explains:

If law firms want to embrace “real innovation”, which creates

value for clients, he suggests the best place to learn “is out in the

business world”. He therefore reads much more about business

and technology than about what other law firms are doing.

“It comes back to what my professor said: it’s about

understanding the world at all times. The answers lie in making

sure you’re as helpful and valuable to your clients as possible,

therefore understanding the environment that they’re living

in and the pressures they are facing. Then taking all of the

innovations in the world and seeing how you apply those from a

legal perspective.”

One example of that innovation comes with what Arthur Cox

has done for the Irish Health Service (HSE) during the past five

years. The firm combined its management expertise with its own

bespoke IT system and then applied it across the health service,

with the result that 30 law firms were all on the Arthur Cox

system when they were reporting work.

“Historically, the HSE had no central management of legal

services, or knew what [it was] spending. We developed the

entire way the HSE manages its legal service,” explains Ó

Ríordáin. “We implemented an Arthur Cox IT system across

the entirety of the health service to manage 30 different firms

at all sorts of different levels – everything from local issues

and district court hearings to childcare, up to the largest of the

corporate issues.”

He sees it as a fusion of legal expertise, management and IT

skills. “We helped reorganise the entire platform; we used our

own systems and handed the structure back five years later

in working and efficient order to the HSE. It was a very big,

innovative project and again something that law firms wouldn’t

usually do. It was recognising what skills we have: management

of legal services is one of them and so is strategy. We applied all

that to the health services here, with very strong results.”

The answers lie in being as helpful and valuable

to your clients as possible, understanding the environment

that they’re living in and the pressures they are facing

were merging and required divestments to meet competition

requirements: Lafarge S.A. and Holcim Ltd.

“A €6.5bn acquisition of assets across 11 jurisdictions. As a firm,

we led it globally,” says Ó Ríordáin. “Traditionally, a deal of that

nature would more likely be led by a magic circle firm or one of

the large American firms, but CRH asked us to do it.” This meant

dealing with with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer (for Holcim)

and Cleary Gottlieb (for Lafarge) on the other side of the table.

“We also had 11 firms internationally working for us in each of

the jurisdictions we were buying assets in – a unique position for

an Irish firm,” he adds.

So what did he learn from the deal? “The better you know your

client and the better you genuinely understand the detail of

what they’re thinking, what their greater context is –

their risk thresholds, their balance sheet, all of it – the

better you are able to advise as a lawyer.”

How does he think that lawyers can innovate

on behalf of clients? “One of my favourite

professors in college said that law is all about

understanding the world. As a student, I didn’t

really understand that. But later on I did. He

was absolutely right: the first thing to do is to

really understand the commercial market

place in which somebody is operating, the

environment.

“Next, know as many of the individuals

at your client as possible. Listen to what

they are saying. Always ask questions,

no matter how stupid or otherwise

they might sound, just make sure you

understand. Over time, you put together

the pieces of the puzzle. This is the

overall picture of the client – not just the

balance sheet, the technical things, the

stock price or the asset that you’re buying

– it’s the interactions of the people, their

focuses, their individual objectives.”

The spirit of innovation is something Ó

Ríordáin championed as managing partner.

“Some of it is obviously just by example,” he

says, “to be at the coalface with clients.” He has

also learnt much about bringing best commercial

practice into Arthur Cox as a director of the Paddy

Power Betfair board and as chairman of Dublin Airport

Authority.

“In those roles, I wear an active business hat – you really

experience a company from the inside.” He applies his knowledge

when doing transactions alongside younger lawyers: “Every day

I’ll ask them: why are you doing that, or why do you think that

way, or did you not consider this in terms of the commercial

realities?”



Patrice Cappello is North America industry

lead, professional services at SAP, where

she has been since 2011. For many

years before that, she was at Deltek

in a variety of senior positions,

focused on driving success

in the professional services

Industry. SAP is used by

more than 85% of the

Global Fortune 500 and by

a significant percentage of

the AmLaw 100 firms.

“It really depends upon

how you define users,”

says Cappello. “If we look at

our customer list, it would

include almost every law firm

because Elite uses part of our

Business Object Suite – anyone

who uses Elite is a SAP customer.

But if you’re talking about a global

platform perspective, we’re gaining

significant market share. Market awareness

is happening: that SAP has got solutions that will

fit the legal industry. It’s been a concerted effort to develop

that awareness.”

As a company, SAP lives by innovation. For its customers, this

means technology that not only works but is also easy to use. “From

the core foundation of finance, billing and customer relationship

management,” says Cappello, “we’ve evolved the product so that

the user experience is much more intuitive because you don’t

want your fee earners spending a week in training.”

“We’ve continued to enhance our products to be available on

any device at any time, without needing to have separate software

to render certain information on an iPad versus other different

tablets, for example, or different types of mobile phones. The

technology is very advanced. From a reporting and analytics

perspective, we’ve added predictive capabilities that put firms

on a different level competitively: to be able to apply predictive

principles rather than basing decisions on tribal knowledge or

intuition.”

SAP goes to market by industry and Cappello serves professional

services, including law firms. She sees her role partly as an

educator and talks to existing and potential

customers about “changes we’re seeing in

the industry, how firms are responding

to external pressures, and how

they are deploying technology to

support their business goals and

objectives”.

She highlights “so much

change occurring”, with law

firms needing to respond.

“There is a lot of potential for

a global player like SAP to

enable these firms to grow.

Because clients are more

sophisticated, expectations

are higher. Law firms are

responding to that, realising

that technology is a huge

enabler. Historically, many firms

haven’t invested internally; whereas

today clients expect transparency,

alternative fee arrangements and a

consistent experience. Nevertheless, firms are

evolving, believing technology is an enabler; it’s

becoming a bigger part of their strategy going forward.”

In using SAP solutions, the benefits of integrated financial

management and billing systems allow a firm with multiple

offices, particularly in multiple jurisdictions, to: “Act as one firm,

to be consistent, to manage globally but also manage in the local

geographies, from a time capture perspective, standardisation of

the billing process, and automation of time-consuming activities

– all with full transparency to the client.”

Cappello adds: “Furthermore, integrating our full suite of talent

management and client engagement solutions to that platform

allows firms to operate their business in a seamless fashion and

empowers the firms to operate in a real-time environment.”Last year, Baker & McKenzie was the first global law firm to

adopt the latest version of SAP. Other prominent clients include

Linklaters and Norton Rose Fulbright. “But,” explains Cappello,

“it’s often more a question of how complex the law firm is rather

than its size. If you look at the professional services firms in

general that use SAP, close to 80% are $500m annual revenue

and under.”

Technology as an enablerPatrice Cappello, North America industry lead, professional services, SAP



Firms are evolving, believing technology is an

enabler; it’s becoming a bigger part of their strategy

going forward



Legal Week Intelligence is the independent research division of

Legal Week, part of the ALM Media group of leading business

publications.

For more than 10 years, Legal Week Intelligence has conducted

research for global and national law firms, companies and vendors

as a group or individually, under strict Market Research Society

guidelines, on generic and industry-specific topics. Research can

be in the public domain or form part of a confidential project for

individual clients on a bespoke basis.

Over the years, we have reached out to thousands of associates,

partners and general counsel.

We advise business leaders on their critical issues and

opportunities including strategy, marketing, operations and

technology. We work with leading organisations across the private,

public and social sectors. We have deep functional and industry

expertise, as well as breadth of geographical reach.

In all cases, Legal Week Intelligence benefits from access to

the industry expertise of Legal Week editors and journalists, a

dedicated research and analysis team, and the global reach of ALM

Media and its affiliates.

This enables our clients to improve the quality of their decision

making by providing them with reliable data, robust analysis and

actionable advice.

We focus debate on the most important and pressing issues

using scalable research products and a flexible multimedia output.

Furthermore, we emphasise the conversion of our information

into actionable advice and we strive to leave businesses stronger

after every engagement.

About Legal Week Intelligence

Ahmed Shaaban is a founding member of Fulcrum Global

Technologies and leads the team in strategic business

development activities.

His organisation’s solutions helped pioneer the development

of several of today’s most strategic enterprise innovations in

industry-specific solutions, using in-memory computing,

mobile analytics, internet commerce models designed to

develop and leverage brands, high speed imaging, security and

encryption for enterprise markets and electronic payments in

the cloud.

Mr. Shaaban is a major contributor to the development

of Chicago’s incubation environment for high technology

companies in the New Millennium. He completed his BS in

Biomedical Engineering at Boston University and his MBA

at Loyola University of Chicago. He has numerous board

appointments.

About Ahmed Shaaban

To produce the inaugural Top 20 Legal IT Innovators report, we

canvassed views across a broad spectrum of those involved in

the sector.

Research was undertaken between June and August 2016

involving more than 100 hours of interviews and discussion

with lawyers and general counsel in multiple jurisdictions. In

deciding who made the list, we used various criteria to identify

those who were most innovative in their use of technology,

systems, processes or products, who applied that directly within

the field of legal services, and who demonstrated a sustained

commitment to the use of IT to improve client services.

It should be noted that Patrice Cappello of SAP, included in

the list as an innovative supplier of services to law firms large

and small, is also the provider of systems to Fulcrum GT.

Methodology

top 20 legal it innovators 2016 - dominic carman … · to introduce the annual top 20 legal it...

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