Innovation as a legal profession

Separating the wheat from the chaff
‍Löfgren explains that while the IT-department covers the internal IT-infrastructure, her job as innovation manager is to have an out looking role: “The job of identifying and implementing new technologies is new. Before, this was an infrastructure matter and it was enough to have an IT-department. Today, this is not enough. We have new sophisticated technologies that are interlinked with the everyday work of the lawyers. So there is a new and time-consuming task of keeping an overview of what is out there, what we should do and not do.”

From a less abstract point of view, that means she is meeting a lot of ventures and companies in order to stay updated on the latest technology developments. She explains that she is looking for secure solutions that are simple, easy to use and compatible with other systems: “We need something with an easy interface. We are getting so many systems that we can't put enormous recourses into training everyone. We can't train lawyers in 10-15 complex solutions, so I look for something I can roll out without too much specific training.”

The legal is growing larger for every day but they both agree that the current market is too immature: “It is very startup dominated and very niche dominated. It is either people coming with a law background starting a company without even talking to the technology people before they start. And sometimes it is the other way around. You have people that know about technology and think they can create something for law firms without knowing how they work. The gap between technologists and lawyers is still big,” Fagerholt explains.

For instance, when researching about E-Discovery tools, Fagerholt found a list of the 100 best E-Discovery tools. With so many different solutions on the market, Fagerholt spends a lot of time just keeping track of what is there. The aim is to get as few tools as possible that cover the needs of as many lawyers and practice areas as possible, but still the total number of applications is growing. Also, they have to support the firm's overall strategy and to be a leading law firm today means that you also have to be in the forefront regarding technology. To accomplish this, you need both lawyers and technologists working full time in collaboration. We used to be only knowledge managers, but these have today often grown into CIO's or CTO’s in many companies because knowledge management has become so digital,” Fagerholt elaborates.

Besides finding new products and helping with the implementation, Löfgren also uses her knowledge to assist clients in Mannheimer Swartling to find the right legal tech solutions for their business. In general, her innovation work can be summed up like this: ”Our longterm goal and strategy is the provide the best legal advice to our clients. So what we do in the innovation department is the basis and the foundation for the rest of the organisation to provide that. We are the starting point of the result. We follow the next steps and keep ahead, so we can be on the forefront and always use the best technologies to help our clients,” she concludes.