Unlocking innovation
New client solutions: Unlocking innovation in a new legal landscape
As technology forces the legal industry to look beyond the traditional billable hour, new digital tools are helping our Firm channel time and resources into the areas that matter most for our clients.
Our Advanced Client Solutions (ACS) team formally launched in April 2024, focused on spearheading the Firm’s innovation initiatives. It follows the appointment of Joe Cohen as Director of Innovation in December 2023, tasked with developing and implementing innovative solutions to meet the evolving needs of our clients.
The Firm’s existing Legal Technology team, led by Tessa Bartley, was absorbed into Joe’s new team and the scope broadened to focus on building out our innovation team; leveraging Generative AI; fostering a culture of innovation; and raising our public profile for innovation. The ACS team now numbers 20 people, including five software developers and one UX/UI designer to focus on subscription-based, revenue-generating SaaS products for our Firm. This will start with a product for some of our private capital clients that is due to launch towards the end of 2025.
As part of our efforts to leverage Generative AI to foster innovation, we launched Sidekick in May 2024 across all our offices. Sidekick is an internal custom Gen AI-powered legal tool designed to change the way we work. The tool is already used by 65% of our employees on a monthly basis for tasks such as clause drafting, document summarisation, translation and legal queries. Currently, it has an average daily usage of 1,200 times across our Firm, with usage highest in our European offices. To support innovation across the Firm, we have formed five Innovation committees that meet quarterly to help drive and champion technology awareness and adoption. Each committee has representation across our offices and is divided into legal practice areas.
of our employees use Sidekick on a monthly basis
average daily use
We’re aware that our innovation success relies, in no small part, on engagement with the next generation of legal talent, and therefore we launched Russell Up in 2024, a scheme that aims to embed innovation into our trainee solicitors’ contracts. As part of the initiative, each of our trainees and apprentices are asked to deliver four innovation projects during the course of their two-year training contract. The modules on offer include: AI, document automation, data visualisation, design thinking robotic process automation (RPA); application building; a business problem discovery workshop and other business cases that don’t fall neatly under these categories. Trainees and apprentices are asked to generate an idea, secure approval from their supervisor, deliver the idea with support from the ACS team and present it to their department upon completion. “Trainees are asking about this element of the scheme when they apply to do their contract with us," says Tessa. “It shows our progressive thinking is making a huge difference to the lawyers that want to work for our Firm.” To encourage support and engagement for innovation across our Firm at all levels, innovation hours spent on tasks – such as testing or piloting new legal technology tools and contributing to revenue-generating solution development projects – will be handled separately to other fee-earning work under a ‘good non-billable code’.
The senior support for the Russell Up scheme has been key to getting engagement across our Firm. There’s been an enormous amount of positive change this year in this area – and this is just the start.”
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