Innovation: a tiresome buzzword, but also a legitimate consideration for law firms seeking to remain competitive in the evolving landscape of legal technology.
For Allen & Overy, this is a top priority. The firm’s success in meeting this challenge shows; they’ve been named “the most innovative” in Europe by the Financial Times five times.
So how do they do it?
They’ve developed what they call an “advanced delivery” model. Advanced delivery is how Allen & Overy describes the bold solutions they are developing, together with clients, to solve legal challenges. Clients face constant pressure to strike the optimal balance of cost, quality, and risk. Allen & Overy is helping them overcome that challenge by broadening the resourcing and the tools they use.
In September 2017, Allen & Overy opened Fuse, a tech innovation space where Allen & Overy lawyers and technologists come together to create and test legal and regulatory solutions alongside their clients. By providing employees with a collaborative and creative space, Allen & Overy enables their workforce to exchange ideas openly and have a direct impact on the technology implemented at their firm. Three companies from the first cohort have remained in Fuse—Avvoka, Legatics, and Nivaura—all focused on ways to help attorneys work smarter and faster, and since then Fuse has introduced five companies to join the second cohort.
Later in 2017, Allen & Overy hired the first global head of e-discovery within the Magic Circle. And now, they’re further investing in their advanced delivery model by joining the RelativityOne community.
We talked with Scott Robson, their global head of e-discovery, about the firm’s global playbook spanning 44 offices in 31 countries. It’s a critical strategy: Fifty-three percent of their transactions involve three or more jurisdictions, and seventy-three percent of their work involves two or more Allen & Overy offices. Moving to the cloud with RelativityOne will help them remain agile, developing and delivering bold solutions to serve their clients around the world.
