White & Case is one of the oldest and largest law firms in the United States. Founded in 1901, the $3.2 billion firm now has more than 2,400 lawyers in 44 offices across 30 countries.
The firm also has a reputation for innovation, having built specialized teams of data technologists, project managers, and lawyers to deploy AI-enabled technologies. Last year, the firm won an “Innovation in Generative AI Strategy” award for the legal field, and it recently hired Isabel Parker to serve the role as Chief Innovation Officer.
We sat down with Parker, who was previously at partner at Deloitte, to discuss innovation at the firm and in the services industry generally. Parker served as Chief Legal Innovation Officer at another global law firm, and is author of “Successful Digital Transformation in Law Firms: A Question of Culture.”
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Tell us about your role as Chief Innovation Officer.
White & Case is an international firm, and my role is truly global. My teams, which include Data, Knowledge, Research, Practice Technology, Innovation and AI, support our lawyers in delivering value to our clients in new ways. There are many routes to achieving this, ranging from process improvement and more efficient matter management right the way through to building sophisticated GenAI solutions in collaboration with clients.
In your book, you talk about the role of culture in digital transformation.
There can be no sustained organizational change without cultural change. If innovation is seen to be the responsibility of just one person or team — the Innovation Officer, or the Development team — it will fail. To be successful, our Innovation team will need to foster a culture of innovation across the firm, giving our lawyers the opportunity to innovate for their practices and clients. Lawyers are busy people, they are perfectionists, they are not comfortable with failure. We need to address some of these cultural elements if innovation is to succeed. The good news is that White & Case has a genuinely entrepreneurial spirit — one of our core values is ”pioneering,” — so there are strong foundations on which to work.
There can be no sustained organizational change without cultural change.
How do you envision integrating GenAI into White & Case’s services?
GenAI is only one part of the innovation toolkit — albeit an increasingly important part — and it is central to our Innovation strategy for this year. GenAI offers tremendous opportunity to deliver value to our clients, in different ways: improved efficiency; a more responsive and tailored client experience; and the ability to offer entirely new services, not possible before. In a very fast-moving technology landscape, we need to maintain our agility, and make sure we don’t lock ourselves into one “big bet” that suddenly becomes obsolete.
The most critical objective is to put the technology into the hands of our lawyers, who know our clients and workflows the best, and support them in surfacing needs that are value-adding to our clients and which we can replicate across the firm. To achieve this, and to build our muscle and skill in working with this new technology, we are making measured investments in both “build” and “buy” areas. Through this approach, we will retain flexibility to build tools to meet specific practice or client needs, as well as to buy tools that may be difficult to build in-house.
And how do you ensure your use of technology is responsive to evolving client needs?
By talking to our clients! Clients are right at the heart of our AI and innovation strategy. Many of our them are grappling with the same questions and challenges that we are when it comes to GenAI. This gives us an opportunity for close collaboration and the chance to learn and build together, strengthening and deepening our relationships.
What metrics do you use to assess the success and impact of innovation initiatives?
The measurement of success depends on the nature of the initiative. For example, measuring the success of a process improvement — removing waste and streamlining delivery — is very different from measuring the success of a GenAI experiment — where “success” could actually be fast failure — which is again different from measuring success in fostering a culture of innovation across the firm — which could be uptake of tools by the lawyers, or engagement with training. We have different metrics for different challenges. The overarching measure of success, ultimately, is whether our innovation efforts have been effective in supporting the overall firm strategy, and the clients and practices that we are strategically focused on growing.
Share an example of a collaboration between partners and innovators that led to an innovative product
At Deloitte, I was part of the team that developed a GenAI product to support Deloitte Legal in streamlining activities related to large-scale contract review — document drafting, comparison against playbooks, comparison and summarization. The product delivered significant savings in terms of efficiency and quality, and is used as part of the Deloitte Legal toolkit for delivery. For White & Case — watch this space! We are actively working on a number of builds to support our legal service delivery, and early results are very promising.
Do legal-tech startups play a role in your innovation strategy?
We have long-established relationships with a select number of legal tech strategic partners, who we consider to be best-in-class and in whom we will continue to invest. That said, particularly for GenAI, where the landscape is very fast moving, we are keeping an active eye on the market. Our strategy is to make measured investments in both build and buy areas — this will include an ongoing assessment of promising startups.
How have you been thinking about ethical considerations related to GenAI and new technologies?
Ethical considerations are central to our approach.
First, we prioritize data privacy and security. Client confidentiality is of course critical, so we’ve implemented protocols around how GenAI tools access, process and store sensitive information, and train our people and our development teams to adhere to them.
Second, we are committed to transparency. We communicate when and how AI technologies are being used in matters, the limitations of these tools and the human oversight we maintain throughout.
Third, we recognize that there are bias and fairness concerns inherent in these technologies. Our Development team, in particular, has this front of mind as we experiment and build.
And fourth, we view our ethical obligations as extending beyond our firm. We’re actively engaged in industry discussions about AI governance, best practices and standards.
Are there innovation practices from other sectors that you’ve tried to (or want to) utilize?
Anyone who works in innovation will stress the importance of constantly looking outside your own industry for inspiration and education. At White & Case, we are in a privileged position, as we work with leading organizations across the globe, all of whom are thinking about how they can innovate and change in a volatile and competitive world. This gives us access to perspectives from all sectors. Consider, for example, how the life sciences sector is embracing AI, how the technology sector is organizing their product teams to get to market faster, or how financial services are thinking about bringing new technologies into a highly regulated environment. This is all highly relevant to our innovation work at White & Case.
Anyone who works in innovation will stress the importance of constantly looking outside your own industry for inspiration and education.
How do you get the partners up to speed on the latest technologies?
One of the pillars of our AI and innovation strategy is education and training — so important to drive cultural change. This doesn’t mean stale classroom learning with PowerPoint. We are rolling out a range of options, including digital delivery of tailored learning pathways, hands-on innovation sessions, labs with clients, innovation secondments and certified programs in collaboration with academia. We will refine this as we learn what resonates most with lawyers and clients..
What’s your opinion on innovation through business model vs. technology?
Our innovation strategy directly aligns with our firmwide strategy, which aims to grow White & Case to support our global client base. Growth is driven by a number of factors, and innovation — whether through use of technology or otherwise — is only one of them. It may be the case that new technologies, such as GenAI, offer the potential for new client services and offerings. These will be aligned to the firm strategy, and driven by client need.
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