Innovation Ambassadors Programme - a Q&A

Two members of our Ashurst Advance team were selected to take part in the City of London Corporation's Innovation Ambassadors Programme. This was a first-of-its-kind legal innovation programme, designed to encourage collaboration across the legal industry and challenge traditional methods of legal service delivery. Working in small teams with representatives from 34 different organisations across various disciplines, Innovation Ambassadors were asked to select from a range of industry challenges and develop and pitch to the board of industry experts an innovative solution to that challenge . 

In this article, we hear from Gemma Mainland, former Digital Services Manager, and Abilash Unny, Senior Legal Process Improvement Manager, about their experience in the first cohort of Innovation Ambassadors and the ideas they developed with their teams during the programme.

Gemma, Abilash – this sounds like it was a very exciting initiative to be part of. Can you tell us about why you wanted to get involved in the programme and how you were selected to take part?

Gemma: I thought it would be a good opportunity to collaborate with likeminded people and learn a few tips on how to efficiently drive innovation. I was over the moon when my application was accepted.

Abilash: I wanted to get involved in this programme to explore how I could harness the skills required to drive innovation as part of my current role. As this was the pilot innovation programme organised by City of London, the initial nomination came from the Ashurst Advance Senior Leadership team followed by an online form in which we detailed our motivation to take part and how we could contribute to this programme. I was delighted to read the email accepting me into the programme considering the large volume of applications received by the City of London team.

Can you tell us a bit more about your experience taking part in the programme? How did you effectively collaborate with your team remotely?

Gemma: Our team collaborated via three different online platforms. We used Zoom when participating in calls and meetings with the wider Innovation Ambassadors programme. When meeting as a team, we preferred Microsoft Teams as it was a good platform to share information in many different formats. Finally, we used a Miro board to share ideas, conduct research and plan out our solution. Lots of tech bridged the gap of being remote!

Abilash: I have read a lot about open innovation spaces so it was great to be participating in one for a change. Our main focus was to collaborate to come up with an idea that would benefit the legal ecosystem, and making some wonderful friends along the way was a bonus. We used multiple digital channels like Slack, Miro, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams to work together efficiently and effectively.

We're intrigued to hear more about your ideas! What challenges and solutions did your teams develop? What feedback did you receive from the board?

Gemma: Our team recognised that there is untapped talent across the legal ecosystem and beyond. Legal service providers, educators and regulators are working in silos. The legal sector needs to work together to produce a strong pipeline of legal, technical and commercial professionals who are properly equipped with the necessary skills and innovation mind-set to deliver high-quality, cost-effective legal services that clients are entitled to expect.

Our solution to unlocking this talent and addressing the innovation skills-gap is Legal Co-Lab. Legal Co-Lab is a cross-industry project to equip students, lawyers, technologists and other industry professionals with the key skills they need for the future, and enable them to expand these skills throughout their professional lives.

The board agreed with our problem statement and really liked our solution. So much so that they chose our idea as the winner!

Abilash: We heard consistently from the in-house panellists that effective collaboration in the legal ecosystem is sadly lacking and there are many gaps in knowledge between the client and their legal teams. . These gaps prevent legal services delivery from being efficient and effective, which in turn negatively impacts the in-house practitioner in the service they can deliver and the reputation of the legal profession.

Through our solution, COLLABIFY, we want to address this problem and incentivise collaboration among in-house practitioners, law firms, legal services businesses, technology providers, and others in the ecosystem. We will do so by creating a comprehensive toolkit designed to address common user challenges, aggregating resources from the industry, and editing the content to fit a common language and tone. The toolkit will help in-house practitioners across three stages: (a) scoping their problem, (b) identifying useful resources, and (c) procuring the most effective services. The toolkit will serve as a two-way service to enable users to "mind the gap" between collaboration and communication and then effectively bridge that gap. It will provide in-house practitioners with a roadmap of where to begin in solving their business problem, and it will provide lawyers with a platform to showcase their expertise. The toolkit will be populated by industry, for industry and can serve as a way to better understand each other’s challenges to deliver a better product.

They both sound really exciting. Is there anything you have learnt from your participation in the programme that you can bring to your day-to-day role?

Gemma: I am now very experienced in using the Microsoft Teams platform and Miro but over and above tech, I have learnt about key methodologies and developed skills that will allow me to better create effective solutions and help drive innovation. I have made a great bunch of friends from taking part in this programme and look forward to working with them on future projects.

Abilash: It is important to remember that we are all part of a large legal ecosystem and I think that "Open Innovation" will play a major part in the way we will deliver legal services in the future. In order for this to develop, it is important for us to create a space for people to collaborate seamlessly and also a support infrastructure/network to help make initiatives that are beneficial for our legal ecosystem a reality. As you can imagine, this requires a lot of groundwork and I see this programme as the first step in creating that space and support infrastructure/network. I feel that I have received a framework and launchpad alongside some tools and techniques which will be useful in my current role. I have also gained the support of a large community of innovative thinkers within the legal industry and some good friends as a result of taking part in this programme.