Legal Business

Law firm tech: Tech trumps

  • Legal Business

    • Allen & Overy

    ‘Someone within their PR team must have been given the direction that any press release they issue has to have the word “innovation”,’ quips one partner at a City firm. Yet despite claims that the firm makes more noise than is justified, Allen & Overy (A&O) deserves its reputation of top tech and innovation team among the UK elite.

    ‘We feel we have given ourselves a competitive advantage on other law firms because we have a proposition that is more mature, so it results in us winning more work of the kind that we want from the clients that we want,’ says Brayne.

    As well as a six-year-old, 100-strong legal services centre in Belfast, since 2014 the firm has fielded its 300-strong, flexible interim resourcing business Peerpoint, led by highly rated chief executive Punt.

    Meanwhile, incubator Fuse hosts and supports legal tech start-ups. It first selected eight companies out of 84 applicants in September 2017. The second round, in April this year, saw five more established names, including Kira, join three of those from the first cohort. Kira co-founder Noah Waisberg says A&O wanted younger companies to learn from more established ones.

    Fully-owned separate company aosphere has developed and sells banks and asset managers online subscription products covering recurring legal and compliance queries in the derivatives and data protection spaces.

    Ashurst

    Ashurst’s focus on technology has increased since the 2014 launch of its Glasgow support hub, which has become a breeding ground for new tools and approaches.

    Despite the scale of the 350-staff Glasgow operation, Polson, who heads Ashurst Advance – the firm’s client-facing innovation arm – says the Anglo-Australian giant remains focused on working with third-party tech providers over building its own kit, most recently rolling out contract review tool Kira across the firm’s practice groups and offices.

    The firm has also bolstered its team recently with recruits such as tech head Jordan, formerly IT director at GE Capital Bank UK, a substantial hire from outside the profession. In September, Ashurst recruited Christopher Georgiou as co-head of Ashurst Advance. Georgiou, a senior derivatives lawyer, re-joined from Fieldfisher, where he previously headed up the firm’s alternative legal solutions platform, CondorALS, for nearly two years.

    Clifford Chance

    Two moves by CC this year gained attention in the legal tech community. In February, the firm acquired Carillion Advice Services in Newcastle as its first nearshoring low-cost centre – a 60-strong paralegal team with plenty of experience in using Luminance and Kira.

    Then in July it became the second Magic Circle firm after Allen & Overy to launch a separate business developing tech tools to sell to clients on a subscription basis. CC Applied Solutions employs five people but aims to grow to around 20 in the next year. As well as marketing the firm’s existing document drafting system, CCDr@ft, and MiFID II compliance tool, the team will launch a new subscription product in mid-November and has around 20 others in the pipeline. Well-regarded legal tech entrepreneur and former CC lawyer Plink was hired in September as its chief executive.

    Visser says subscription products will generate a ‘substantial part’ of CC’s revenues over time, while conceding it will take three to five years to make an impact.

    CMS

    Still largely unnoticed among tech professionals at peer firms, CMS’s UK team stands out for its unusually high tech budget at 7.5% of the firm’s revenue.

    Through its equIP programme, the firm gives legal advice to early-stage tech start-ups at a discounted rate with a view to cementing its relationship with the businesses developing the latest tools.

    Launched in 2015 by legacy Olswang and inherited by CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang through its three-way merger in May 2017, participants are selected by a board of CMS lawyers and offered a three-year, 50% discount on rates for advice on areas including corporate, intellectual property and tax. The programme involves more than 60 businesses and will now be rolled out across CMS’s international network.

    DLA Piper

    Eager to put the memories of 2017’s catastrophic cyber attack behind it, DLA Piper says the experience has strengthened its tech ambitions. Critics note that DLA’s priorities remain ‘keeping the lights on’, with the firm’s expansive size often considered inhibiting of tech development.

    Despite DLA’s size being seen as predisposing the firm to conventional tech tools, the firm stresses that access to jurisdictions such as Australia aid technology adoption, as DLA leans towards partnering with third-party providers such as Neota Logic, Kira, iManage and Thomson Reuters.

    Eversheds Sutherland

    Sceptical of other firms’ engagement with embryonic start-ups, IT head Mcmanus stresses the dangers of investing in new tech providers ‘for the sake of it to get a good headline’.

    ‘The relationship with start-ups is never an easy one. It’s not as simple as phoning them up and getting something for free or the tool in exchange for some funding.’

    He looks to garner a balance between internal bespoke solutions, start-ups and the big traditional providers in the hope of creating a balanced technology portfolio, adding that the firm is increasing tech funding year-on-year as a percentage of revenue.

    After Eversheds’ merger with Sutherland Asbill & Brennan in 2017, it is currently running two different contract review systems across the two legacy firms, using Kira in the US while remaining one of only two top-12 firms to use Luminance in the UK alongside Slaughter and May.

    Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer

    Parker is well spoken of in tech circles, but overall Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is considered in some quarters to be lagging behind its Magic Circle counterparts in technology. The firm has placed renewed emphasis on tech development with the appointment of Baldwin in January this year.

    Over the last eight months Baldwin has secured a mandate from the firm’s leadership to back a three-year investment plan in technology.

    However, the sense is this new impetus is a direct result of a previous lack of a real tech strategy at the firm. The move to sponsor Legal Geek’s annual conferences was a shrewd marketing move but has yet to provide any long-term advantage for Freshfields in the start-up market.

    One of the early adopters of Kira in 2016, the firm implemented a pioneering project to train the system to review contracts in German for the first time.

    Herbert Smith Freehills

    ‘I simplify technology tools to Lego bricks – there are some interesting shapes you can put together,’ says Tyler. Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) is confident in writing technology software itself, as well as customising external tools to suit its service requirements.

    Tyler insists HSF is on the more enthusiastic side of migrating towards the cloud, with the next 12 months expected to be a continuing assessment of how much technological capacity is kept on the premises.

    The firm remains a client of Kira, which Tyler considers the most lawyer-friendly tech provider in the market.

    Hogan Lovells

    Although Hogan Lovells’ tech team is rarely spoken of – for good or for ill – its head of legal service delivery Allen’s CV includes spells at DLA Piper, PwC and Berwin Leighton Paisner, and he is a well-known figure in the legal tech community.

    The firm counts document review, automation and legal trend analysis tools as its most significant tech. It is a keen endorser of start-up Clocktimizer, used to get a better understanding of its resource allocation and the time lawyers spend on mandates, and is one of the latest subscribers to Kira.

    Linklaters

    Linklaters’ speciality lies in its track record for backing emerging legal tech businesses. The first Magic Circle firm to announce an agreement with an artificial intelligence (AI) provider in May 2016, Linklaters’ collaboration with RAVN included developing a Google-style search engine, internally dubbed Matter Explorer. It enables lawyers to access information from the firm’s previous mandates and helps them identify the right people from the firm’s global network who can assist with a new client matter.

    Linklaters also worked with tech start-up Eigen Technologies – headed by its former senior adviser Lewis Liu – to launch its own AI platform for data extraction and document analysis, Nakhoda, in 2017. In April the firm used Nakhoda to develop ISDA Create – IM, a service allowing firms to electronically negotiate initial margin documentation backed by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association.

    Norton Rose Fulbright

    A core part of Martyr’s 2020 strategy, Norton Rose Fulbright (NRF) engaged in one of the most talked about technology endeavours of recent years as it set about integrating its five legacy firms under a single practice management system.

    The transition to SAP, which went live at the end of 2017, came with a hefty price tag and presented serious challenges with enabling the notoriously inflexible system to take on new legal matters. ‘We started from five different sets of matter-opening procedures and different jurisdictions have different legal requirements,’ says Martyr.

    He refuses to comment on whether the final figure exceeded or fell short of a rumoured $100m, but says the system was delivered on budget. The firm will now focus on tweaking SAP and its ancillary systems over the next year.

    Abrahams claims NRF was the first large law firm to create an artificial intelligence-based chatbot, a piece of software engaging in a natural-language conversation with users to answer their questions. Called Parker, it rolled out its first version last year to assist businesses responding to changes in the Australian data protection notification regime. Another version launched in May and covers GDPR. Abraham says the firm uses Parker as a ‘pre-sale tool’ for clients seeking privacy advice and was accountable for $50,000 worth of advice in its first two months of life.

    Slaughter and May

    Despite its reputation for conservatism, Slaughter and May’s 5% stake in artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Luminance makes it one of the largest law firm holders of equity in the legal start-up sector.

    Though questions remain over Luminance’s market share compared to AI counterparts Kira, it remains the tip of Slaughters’ AI spear, and is widely considered a significant move by the firm.

    With Browne at the helm of its technology strategy, Slaughters prefers to buy rather than build, stressing the advantages of external providers’ development teams providing regular upgrades on the firm’s most used kit.

    Slaughters also began working with contract creation tool Avvoka earlier this year, as it remains primed for a second exclusively legal tech incubator expected to launch in early 2019 with more established names potentially making up the cohort.

    * Market estimate, not provided by the firm

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