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Billie Moore and Jezah Khamisa, knowledge & innovation managers at Slaughter and May, reflect on the genesis and growth of the magic circle firm’s Innovation Network, which provides a forum for clients to share ideas and experiences within the legal tech space.

 

In the summer of 2021, we launched a dedicated Innovation Network for members of in-house legal and legal operations teams at our client organisations. The Network serves as a forum for our clients to connect and share ideas and experiences within the innovation and legal tech space. We currently have around 90 individuals from across 50 of our client organisations involved in the Network, and this number continues to grow.

Prior to establishing a formal Network, we were regularly in touch with our clients around innovation related topics, including legal tech. When launching our legal tech programme, Collaborate, in 2019, we wanted to ensure our clients were involved in, and benefited from the programme, and therefore created a ‘Client Panel’ made up of six client organisations. In 2020 the panel grew to 12 client organisations, many of whom requested to be involved. We were also often collaborating with clients to offer innovation related training within their organisation.

 

Throughout these conversations, we recognised common themes, pressures and pain points arising, with many organisations facing similar opportunities and challenges. We felt that our clients could benefit from collaborating with each other directly, with us, and with our lawyers and so we set up the Client Innovation Network to facilitate this. Billie Moore has led the project since its launch.

“Working on our Client Innovation Network over the past year has been very exciting. Through the Network we are able to connect with our clients on innovation and legal tech as a group and offer access to