Technology

Law Firm Meets Incubator: Driving Legal Innovation From Within

Clifford Chance Applied Solutions provides another model that law firms can look to for practical means of driving innovation forward.

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(Image via Clifford Chance)

In last month’s article, we discussed how Dentons is pursuing an outside-in investment model in legal tech innovation by working with Nextlaw Labs and NextLaw Ventures. Leverage of a venture capital model is a unique approach for a law firm to spur innovation — but there are certainly other approaches.

To highlight a different and perhaps more traditional approach, I reached out to Jeroen Plink, CEO of Clifford Chance Applied Solutions. Jeroen boasts more than two decades of experience in legal technology development and became a pioneer of legal tech long before it was a familiar phrase in our industry. He started at Clifford Chance as an associate in the firm’s Amsterdam office and went on to found a legal tech software company which he sold to Practical Law Company (PLC) in the UK. In 2007, he established PLC US, of which he served as the CEO.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with PLC and the then groundbreaking approach to providing actionable content to help lawyers with processes such as managing buy-outs and handling contract management. After the company was sold to Thomson Reuters in 2013, Jeroen continued work in the legal tech space as an advisor for investors in legal tech companies. Through his advisory work, he came back in contact with Clifford Chance, working with Bas Boris Visser, Partner and Global Head of Innovation and Business Change at the firm, to discuss innovation in the law. The result of their work together has taken the form of Clifford Chance Applied Solutions, an organization within the firm, with Jeroen as its CEO.

“We are seeing tremendous pressure for in-house teams to increase speed and efficiency, lower costs and simultaneously play a more strategic role within their organizations,” said Jeroen. “The Applied Solutions team works closely with Clifford Chance’s clients to meet that demand. Our chief objective is to work with the firm’s clients, technology partners and lawyers around the world to develop new tech solutions that aim to solve some of the most common challenges facing practitioners.”

The key difference between Dentons’s model and Clifford Chance’s is the role that the firm takes. In Dentons’s case, the firm acts as an anchor investor in an independently run VC fund that seeks new legal tech startups to support. In Clifford Chance’s model, Clifford Chance Applied Solutions is a company related to the firm, creating software solutions for its clients.

Clifford Chance Applied Solutions is one of three units underpinning the firm’s Innovation and Best Delivery strategy, governed by Clifford Chance’s innovation leadership group. The other two units are Clifford Chance Create, which focuses on defining the future of legal services through collaboration, exploration, investment, and testing; and Best Delivery, which brings together experts in process improvement and legal project management together with lower cost delivery centers and technology solutions to help lawyers.

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“Clifford Chance Applied Solutions combines the firm’s legal expertise and industry-leading software to help our clients cope with increasing regulatory pressure,” Jeroen explained.

Ideas for new products for Clifford Chance Applied Solutions come from clients and lawyers in the firm. Selection of new ideas is a rigorous process that includes various stakeholders. Before the firm makes a decision to invest in a new product, various criteria need to be met, the most important one being that the product could provide meaningful benefits to their clients. Another important factor is the desire for products to leverage the firm’s practice areas.

“Our product development team includes people with strong experience developing products from the legal market. Our recently appointed head of product has been a finance partner at an Am Law 50 firm, followed by over 10 years of product development experience at PLC and Thomson Reuters.” Jeroen said. “An important aspect of our development methodology is to include the end users and Clifford Chance lawyers throughout the process, collect their underlying knowledge, and combine their know-how with the right technology solution.”

While some solutions may be very niche and specific to a particular market, Jeroen and his colleagues have identified a number of use cases that are independent of practice areas. “Using CCDr@ft, our document automation as a service offering, we have automated, for example, all mid-market loan documentation for a large bank allowing over 2,000 loan officers, not lawyers, to create all loan documents independent from the legal team. The same technology is being used in a large media investment fund to automate corporate structuring transactions,” said Jeroen. “This solution aims to increase efficiency and ensure consistency and compliance with the firm’s policies whilst reducing the workload of the legal department. One bank recently reported a 20 percent increase in workload but using this technology they were able to stay at the same headcount.”

Through their work with Clifford Chance’s clients around the world, the Applied Solutions team has a unique view on challenges facing lawyers and the tech solutions that will help overcome those challenges. “Historically, in the US, eDiscovery and legal research were the main focus for legal tech,” Jeroen said. “In the last few years, in both the UK and in the US, the focus is shifting to software that helps clients to better understand what’s in their data. In legal research, artificial intelligence is playing an increasing role. I think that data extraction has significant potential for functions such as due diligence. We’re also seeing some firms use data science to extract value from historic matters including time writing systems to standardize matters and enable better assessment of fixed fees.”

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Clifford Chance Applied Solutions provides another model that law firms can look to for practical means of driving innovation forward. As we see more examples of firms creating means for developing legal tech, we may see an acceleration not only in rate of adoption of new solutions, but also new use cases for the industry to solve.

May Goren Photography

Dean Sonderegger is Vice President & General Manager, Legal Markets and Innovation at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., a leading provider of information, business intelligence, regulatory and legal workflow solutions. Dean has more than two decades of experience at the cutting edge of technology across industries. He can be reached at Dean.Sonderegger@wolterskluwer.com.

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