Blogs

"I think I’d be remiss in not saying that all IT departments need to embrace Innovation as part of their mandate and a key business requirement.  As we’ve spent that last number of years moving infrastructure and core applications to the cloud maturity model, it only sets the tone for the transformation of traditional IT services and embracing and providing innovation solutions to business productivity issues .  That being said, many Firms, including ours, also understand that Innovation is an evolution of Knowledge Management, and ultimately best served as the primary driving department."

"It is probably an easier sell for organizations to start with putting an innovation function into IT but that does imply that the only innovation available is IT related innovation?  A key issue here is perception - what is the perception of IT – are they perceived as a business partner delivering value or a costly overhead? If the latter, then does that hinder the perception of the innovation department? Also consider the culture/mindset – the innovation mindset should be one of disruption and a willingness to break things. The culture of IT may be operational resilience, availability and reliability."

"I suspect the bigger question at the moment is what is the role of the innovation department post Covid-19?  There is a huge imperative to drive sales, minimise cost and drive efficiency and it is vital that both IT Departments and Innovation Departments recognise this. I don’t have strong views about where they sit so long as: 1) they co-exist and work as a single team; 2) they each recognise each other’s strengths and weaknesses and leverage each other’s skills where needed; 3) Their project programmes, resourcing and governance dovetail in some way. This does not mean they adopt the same methodologies but more that as a business things are co-ordinated and repetition is eliminated."

Fish and Richardson P.C. recognized the benefits of creating two groups who could focus on what they do best. The Legal Technology Services team was created to serve the innovative technology needs of our clients.
Our IT Department focuses on resilience and security of our infrastructure.Legal Technology Solutions group works closely with our IT Department on a daily basis to make sure we’re providing great service to our clients and our firm.

Who better to understand what innovating technologies would be game changing to the firm, than an experienced Lawyer, passionately working on tech adoption under the KM mandate?   How many times have traditional IT Services failed driving technology change that is seen as just a burden, or simply for the sake of change?  The key benefit has got to be level of adoption and lawyer satisfaction with respect to improved work product.

You want the innovation team to be freed of the burden of maintaining the “legacy” of operational IT. If they are tied to IT, will they get that freedom -  will they be sufficiently ring-fenced or will they be dragged into operational fire-fighting scenarios when critical systems are unstable or down?  But you also want alignment – you have to ensure that whatever is built by the innovation team can be deployed and supported internally by IT.

Without the above you end up with anarchy and inefficiency  – you can’t run an airport without air traffic control and the pilots ignoring each other Also bad decisions are made. IT teams tend to have a long term ethos – solutions have to last and be resilient but have less domain knowledge in law. Innovation people tend to be more demand led with greater domain knowledge in certain (but not all areas) but sometimes are not as aware of the long term implications of their decisions and often then move onto the next project. To take the best decisions you need both.

The group’s team of application specialists, business analysts, quality assurance automation engineers and developers are tasked with creating client-facing and internal legal tech solutions. For example, we are using machine learning to auto-classify documents and incoming mail from the Patent and Trademark Office that allows us to route mail automatically to the appropriate teams. We are using machine learning to auto-classify time cards to provide better data to our pricing group. Another initiative is the modernization of our development stack with Kubernetes. All our new internal applications are deployed in containers.