Beyond the hype: how we built a real innovation culture in our law firm

It feels like not a day goes by without another press release announcing a law firm signing up to the latest AI tool or service. The noise is relentless. Amid all the excitement, it’s easy to overlook a crucial point: how do we avoid chasing technology for its own sake and how do we foster an innovation culture that delivers real business value?

This is the story of how we approached that question, and the practical lessons we learned along the way.

The catalyst: stepping back to move forward

We’ve had an Innovation Committee for a long time. But in early 2025, we made a conscious decision to pause and reflect on what innovation truly meant to us as a firm, and what our approach needed to look like if it was going to drive real, lasting success.

The catalyst was a natural inflection point. We had just completed the first year of our latest three-year business plan. As good practice dictates, we used that milestone to review what had been a successful opening year, and to stress-test whether our strategy still held for the two years ahead. But we didn’t stop there. We pushed our thinking further, out to 2030, asking ourselves a bigger question: what do we want and need this firm to be by the end of the decade, for our clients, our people, the environment we work in, and our financial sustainability?

This extended view really brought home the critical role that technology, and AI in particular, was going to play in shaping the firm we aspire to become. We realised that we would need to review and adapt our approach to innovation immediately if we were to build the necessary foundations by 2030. So that’s what we did.

If you’re in the same position, here’s what we learned

If you find yourself watching announcements of new launches roll in, unsure whether to act or hold back, or tempted to follow the herd, here are the principles and practical steps that guided us.

1. Start with strategy, not technology. AI can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, and it’s remarkably easy to spend a great deal of money on something that doesn’t fit your organisation or what you’re trying to achieve. Our first step was deceptively simple: think deeply about what the business needs to achieve over the next three to five years, viewed through multiple lenses, clients, people, operations, environment, finance. Then assess what’s genuinely needed to get there. Spoiler: it might not just be technology. But let’s face it, it’s likely to include it.

2. Don’t confuse innovation with AI. Innovation does not mean AI. AI does not mean innovation. And innovation certainly doesn’t have to mean technology. There are countless ways to be innovative. AI will almost certainly have a role to play in any modern law firm’s future, but so will how we interact with our clients, how we develop our people, and how we rethink our processes. When we built our innovation roadmap, we deliberately thought far more broadly than AI alone.

3. Culture first, tools second. For us, the real prize was embedding an innovation culture across the entire firm, one rooted in empowering our people and actively encouraging curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking. Without the right culture, even the best technology will gather dust.

4. Make innovation everyone’s job. We actively decided against creating a standalone “Innovation Team”. Instead, we reconstituted our Innovation Committee as the Innovation Steering Group: a deliberately small, cross-functional group of people who could directly influence and drive the innovation agenda. The reasoning was simple. For a firm our size, we didn’t want one person or team to own innovation. We wanted it woven into the role and responsibility of everyone, part of the very DNA of our people, with a collective ownership for opportunity identification and delivery.

5. Bring the senior leadership team on the journey. You can’t drive meaningful change without the top table. We arranged a series of presentations showcasing different innovative tools and services, portals, AI solutions, and more, complemented by sessions from trusted external experts on where the legal market was heading. The effect was powerful. Our Senior Leadership Team didn’t just understand what we needed to do; they actively bought into, and championed, how we proposed to do it. A tangible sign of that commitment was the appointment of one of the Managing Directors of our legal divisions as our dedicated innovation sponsor.

6. Set clear guardrails. With senior buy-in secured, we established clear guardrails to define what innovation meant to us and where we would direct our focus and energy. For the first year of this innovation strategy, our key principles were:

• Develop a culture of curiosity and innovation across the firm.
• Focus on the whole firm, not pockets of excellence. We wanted to lift the general use, knowledge, and skills of everyone, not just specific teams using specific tools.
• Treat early adoption as a learning laboratory. We used this phase to develop and refine our approach to the soft requirements around technology: policy, compliance, supervision of lawyers using AI, pricing implications, training, and adoption strategies.
• Build an informal ecosystem of champions drawn from across the firm, legal and operations, partners to trainees, every function who would support and drive our innovation activities.
• Prioritise internal efficiencies first. Our initial focus for AI was on embedding tools internally and learning from the experience. Once that foundation was solid, we would shift attention to how innovation could directly transform the way we work with clients.
• Be disciplined about what we say no to. We couldn’t pursue every opportunity available. Our guardrails helped clarify decision-making, ensuring our focus never deviated from the things that would put us on the right path to 2030 and created robust foundations for the future.
• Don’t stop learning. Throughout this process we have continually learned about what is available in the market, what suppliers are doing, how the technology is developing and how our peers have been progressing their own journeys. One of the most important benefits has been finding supplier partners who really fit us as a firm and buy into what we are trying to achieve, and how.

Turning principles into practice

Strategy without execution is just wishful thinking. Here’s how we brought our approach to life.

• 12-week innovation sprints. We designed a structured programme of short, focused sprints to assess the value and applicability of different technologies and innovations in a controlled way.
• Permission to fail. We recognised and openly accepted that if we were being genuinely rigorous, not every sprint would prove valid or applicable. That wasn’t failure; it was a sign we were doing the right things.
• Hard stops and proper governance. When a sprint finished, no matter how promising, the service was shut down completely for formal review. If we decided to invest, we built a proper, production-strength service, not a patched-up version of the pilot. Unsuccessful sprints were fully decommissioned. No lingering experiments.
• Four sprints in twelve months, with deliberate overlaps to maintain momentum.
• Real-world use cases, not theoretical exercises. Two of our four sprints focused on generative AI tools. We worked with our champions from every practice group to identify a catalogue of genuine business use cases, legal and operational, to trial with the AI tools. This allowed us to assess which solution worked for which scenario, and critically, where the technology simply didn’t deliver.
• A self-fulfilling cycle of discovery. Once the teams involved started using the technology in earnest, more use cases and opportunities were identified, trialled, and assessed organically. Curiosity bred momentum.

Communication, policy and outcomes

Throughout the 12 months, we ran a firmwide communication and awareness programme, sharing openly what we were doing around innovation. We championed the innovation culture we were building, reinforcing our core values and behaviours which, fittingly, include curiosity.

We also used this period to review and strengthen our AI policy, create new guidance around supervision for partners and managers, and confront the commercial implications head-on, particularly the efficiency gains these tools were delivering for teams working on a time and materials basis. These are not easy conversations, but they are essential ones.

So where did all of this leave us?

Over the course of the year, we introduced four new strategic innovation tools to the firm, including two generative AI tools. For our legal-specific AI platform, we chose Jylo. Jylo has supported our innovation across both our legal and operations groups, evaluating a breadth of use cases already delivering meaningful impact. What set Jylo apart wasn’t just the technology; it was the partnership. At every stage, their team provided an exceptional level of support, working closely with us to understand our needs and adapt to our pace.

We now have an established and structured Innovation Steering Group to shape our future direction, and an enthusiastic, committed ecosystem of people from across the firm who are genuinely championing our innovation journey. Adoption levels have been excellent, and across the firm we’re already seeing tangible benefits from the changes we’ve made.

But perhaps the most important outcome is this: we are learning. We don’t yet have all the answers, but they’re developing, sprint by sprint, conversation by conversation. We’ve also produced a clear roadmap for the next 12 to 18 months.

A final thought

If you’re standing where we stood at the start of 2025, watching the market move, feeling the pressure to act, but unsure of the right path, my advice is this: resist the urge to leap before you look. Start with your strategy. Build the culture. Empower your people. Set guardrails. Test rigorously. Learn relentlessly.

The firms that will thrive by 2030 won’t necessarily be the ones that changed quickest or adopted AI first. They’ll be the ones that innovated thoughtfully, with purpose, with discipline, and with their people at the heart of the journey.