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Linklaters

Innovation is about doing things differently – unleashing the imagination of our people to challenge the present and shape the future.

Innovation lies at the core of our purpose of delivering legal certainty in a changing world. It runs through everything we do at Linklaters – our legal advice, the way we deliver our services to clients and the way we run our business. We believe the best responses to the challenges brought about by change, whether commercial, geo-political or cultural, require creative, innovative and collaborative thinking.

We channel our ideas and resources through three streams to develop products, processes and initiatives in an agile yet robust way:

Technology & Process

We continually leverage market-leading technology on our transactions, and where none exists, we can develop our own proprietary products. We design processes that enable us to maximize operational efficiency on transactions as well as in the way we run our business.

We trial and run proofs of concept regularly to ensure our lawyers have the best solutions available to them. This provides us with a comprehensive workbench of both internal and external facing tools to ensure our lawyers are working as efficiently as possible for our clients.

LegalTech Solutions

We invest significantly in innovative legal technology (including AI) to solve complex problems for our clients and our business. Our dedicated matter delivery experts are always looking for ways to provide value to our clients without comprising on quality. Through Nakhoda, our flagship AI technology platform, we deploy the smartest solutions and ideas in the market, from machines learning, to automate legal logic, to deliver products that make a real difference to our clients.

We have an active LegalTech working group that includes our Heads of Innovation, LegalTech and Technology. The groups works with our Practice Innovation and Efficiency Teams to ensure that we identify, trial and test new and emerging technologies in an agile and delivery-focused way.

Business Improvement

We continually evaluate our internal processes and systems via a continuous improvement programme in order to enhance efficiencies in everything we do, including Legal Project Management and Alternative Resourcing.

Re:link

Re:link is our major new platform for contract lawyers, providing our clients access to an extensive community of high quality resource to deliver work on a fixed term basis. The platform is wholly aligned with Linklaters and reflects our ongoing commitment to matching the needs of clients and lawyers.

Partnership & Collaboration

To find real and workable solutions to new and “disruptive” challenges, a partnership of shared ambition, success and risk across all legal verticals – in-house, academia, regulators and private practice – is key.

We’ve been working across the global innovation community to develop partnerships and collaborations and to share learning and experience.

Crowdcube & TechLinks

We have an exclusive legal partnership with Crowdcube to provide innovative start-ups access to cutting edge legal advice while giving us exposure to exciting new tech and fintech companies that have the potential to disrupt their industries. This partnership is central to Crowdcube’s strategy of establishing longer term relationships with clients through the ongoing service delivery beyond initial funding.

TechLinks is our innovative platform, aimed at helping tech entrepreneurs turn their small business into a company with the potential to grow.

Nivaura

We have a strategic investment in, and collaboration with fintech company Nivaura. Founded three years ago, Nivaura’s focus is on the deployment of digital investment banking platforms for banks, exchanges and other financial institutions. These platforms connect and automate fragmented and manual processes involved in the issuance and administration of instruments such as debt, equity and structured notes. This has the potential to significantly reduce time to market and costs.

The LawTech Delivery Panel

We are assisting the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce (UKJT) to prepare a market-wide authoritative legal statement on distributed ledger technology and smart contracts under English private law.

Microsoft Digital Transformation Project

We worked with Microsoft to create a cross-industry report highlighting how lawyers can be the enablers of digital transformation in an organisation. The year-long project included a survey of over 900 in-house counsel across APAC and a consultation road-show of the survey results via discussion forums involving 150 leading in-house counsel in Jakarta, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore. Click here to view the report.

People & Culture

Our people are alive to the changes and challenges around them and are a key part of the solutions.

We strive to empower them to make change and provide them the tools, skills and environment to effect that change.

We have a suite of resources to help our people deliver innovative ideas.

Practice Innovation & Efficiency (PIE) teams

Our engine of change, these teams of lawyers are empowered to make change in their respective practice groups and offices. They have access to a central innovation fund along with resources such as developers and solutions architects to help bring their ideas to life.

Ideas Pathway

Recognising that no one person or team has a monopoly on good ideas, we launched a global platform to collectively capture and share ideas from all parts of the firm, enabling us to foster creative thinking at scale. Most recently, our Singapore office ran an ideas campaign to increase agile working in transactional practices – the campaign lasted 5 days and 54% of the office actively participated, 43 ideas were submitted with over 250 comments.

Global Coding Club

Coding has become an increasingly relevant skill in our industry. We launched the Global Coding Club so that our people better understand underpinning legal technologies and can work with developers to design and build tech-enabled solutions.

Crowdcube's Emerging Tech Campaign

We have become a brand sponsor for an AI and Robotics campaign being run by Crowdcube in collaboration with Britbots.

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Our AI Toolkit

Artificial intelligence raises a number of practical, legal and ethical challenges. Our toolkit provides insight on how to address these issues.

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Inside Sherpa

The Inside Sherpa platform offers free online internships where students can interact with virtual clients and colleagues in a way that replicates the day-to-day work of Linklaters.

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Ideas Pathway

The Ideas Pathway, the ideation technology platform, allows the Firm to crowdsource ideas from employees across the globe.

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Re:link

We connect our thriving community of market-leading contract lawyers with high-profile assignments at Linklaters and its clients, providing legal teams with expert support when they need it most.

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LegalTech Summer School

The Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law at Swansea University launched its LegalTech Summer School in August. Linklaters provided input on the design of this course to help law firms and in-house counsel learn about applying technology.

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Legal Design in Practice

We have redesigned our training contract offer letter using principles of legal design. This reflects the firm's wider efforts in the space, designing legal content and service delivery to increase access, usability and effectiveness for our clients.

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Matter Explorer

In August 2019, we launched MatterExplorer, an AI powered search and knowledge management system, reducing search time for the firm’s 750,000 legal documents from hours to seconds.

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The Law Tech Delivery Panel

Linklaters is assisting the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce as it coordinates the preparation of an authoritative legal statement on distributed ledger technology and smart contracts under English private law.

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Legal Innovators - Shilpa Bhandarkar

‘Be Brave And Try New Things’. Our Head of Innovation, Shilpa Bhandarkar, gives insight on how our firm and other organisations can sustain innovation for the long term.

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