Innovation Lead

A&O Shearman

A&O Shearman is a new global industry-leading law firm, with 48 offices in 29 countries worldwide. Our fluency in English law, US law, and the laws of the world’s most dynamic markets, enables us to provide unmatched insight and seamless delivery to clients. We work on challenging and important deals and disputes that have the potential to shape the future.
 
We offer exceptional opportunities for our people; opportunities to work for the world’s leading businesses; to transform the status quo, and to deliver your best work, helping you and your career to thrive, while delivering unparalleled outcomes for our clients. Whether you're helping clients solve complex challenges, transforming the ways we manage our business, or ensuring the smooth-running of our operations, this is an environment where you can belong and excel. We provide first-rate training and development, we are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion and we provide support and ways of working that help you optimise your wellbeing.
 
What truly defines a career with us? We recruit the best and ask for the best of you. And together, we will redefine success.

Department Purpose

This role will work most closely with the Legal Innovation team (LIT), whose role is to drive efficiency and business growth by encouraging the use of relevant technology, alternative resourcing solutions and client’s solutions within legal teams. The team brings together the optimum combination of legal practice expertise, innovation knowledge, and transformation capabilities to deliver on the Firm and Practice Group (PG) strategies and our clients’ priorities.

Since its creation in May 2021, the LIT has grown and evolved, developing an operating model that has been instrumental in successfully unlocking the potential of innovation capabilities across the firm. The team is made up of ex-practising senior lawyers, who each previously worked in the four largest A&O practice groups. They work closely alongside a team of Legal Process Improvement specialists. The LIT mission statement is to: “Support business growth and improve the experience of our clients and our people by driving the firm's strategic vision of delivering innovative, client-focused solutions, fostering a culture of collaboration, creativity, and continuous improvement.”

The Role 

The Innovation Lead – Global Disputes will support and work with the Global Head of Innovation – Disputes to drive efficiency and generate business growth by identifying relevant tools and services and areas of expertise within A&O Shearman’s innovation teams which can be leveraged and supporting on the implementation of these resources. 

The LIT is uniquely positioned within the firm to turn concepts, ideas and solutions into ways of working that deliver real business outcomes for our lawyers and clients. The ability to provide professional and innovative services is a key part of A&O Shearman’s Disputes strategy going forward and involves engagement with senior stakeholders across the business. 

Disputes requires further support from this role to assist with managing change across the Disputes department. The change process is enabled through the creation of Working Groups focused on driving tailored innovation strategies for practices and products across the global network and working with our innovation Disputes champions to pilot new ways of working. Further, the role is needed to assist with delivering greater cohesion via a centralised and data driven innovation function, focused on driving growth, sharing knowledge, reducing silos, developing legal best practice and embedding a culture of continuous improvement.

Disputes is also responsible for training our lawyers at all stages in their careers both through group, firm-wide programs as well as working 121 on development of candidates through promotion or focusing on specific team needs. 

The Innovation Lead – Global Disputes would be involved in supporting the Global Head of Innovation - Disputes with all of the above, including attending demonstrations of and trialling tech products (including AI tools) with a strong understanding of how disputes matters work and therefore where those technologies/ solutions would be relevant.

Key Responsibilities 

Part of a team responsible for growing the use of relevant technology, alternative resourcing solutions and client solutions in Disputes, they will:develop a deep understanding of the Disputes practice areas and matter types, growth strategy, client strategy and regional priorities and challenges to: (i) enable identification of opportunities for innovation and (ii) resolve pain points and improve lawyer experience in local markets. use a deep understanding of innovation capabilities, to inform how different Disputes teams might leverage relevant tools and services and grow their use of relevant areas of expertise on matters and in the context of other client engagements.leverage data and forums to identify need and opportunities for increased use of technology, alternative resourcing solutions and client solutions across Disputes teams and co-ordinate the engagement with relevant innovation teams.support the development of an annual innovation growth plan based on the Disputes strategic priorities and agree key objectives and KPIs with relevant innovation teams and Disputes management.work with the eDiscovery team to assist in use of current A&O tools – RelativityOne and Opus2.support the management and progress of existing Working Groups across the Disputes department and identify the need and opportunities to launch new Working Groups.input into Disputes strategy and global initiatives as appropriate, including supporting with client strategy projects, forums, and steering committees.keep the Disputes department informed of developments in innovation and examples of use across the network, through relevant forums, groups, and internal communications.draft and deliver educational elements such as online training sessions to share and develop best practice.support in building engagement between innovation teams and the Disputes department, including senior stakeholders.Who we are looking for An experienced Lawyer who has 5+ years’ experience working in Disputes, ideally within an international law firm.Experience with relevant tech tools used in the Disputes space and familiarity with technological solutions and tools such as Relativity.Fosters excellent relationships and works in partnership with senior stakeholders to influence decisions and offer effective solutions.Has a high-level of interpersonal skills and is adept at reading and communicating with people at all levels.Possesses a high degree of initiative to seek new areas of opportunity.Creative, persistent, and resourceful in coming up with solutions to complex problems.Takes pride in influencing the success of other teams with ability to work at pace and under pressure.Process-driven mindset with excellent attention to detail and ability to prioritise and multi-task.Experience working with large, multi-jurisdictional teams and managing large projects.Flexible with respect to assigned tasks and engagements due to changing deadlines, deliverables, and task priorities.

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