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Team size: 800

Major legal advisers: Addleshaw Goddard, Allen & Overy, Ashurst, Baker McKenzie, Clifford Chance, Dentons, Linklaters, Pinsent Masons, Simmons & Simmons, TLT, White & Case

The lack of innovation from law firms has long plagued the industry and Barclays’ head of relationship management, Chris Grant, wants to change that. His focus is on driving change in the behaviour of law firms and teaching them about what innovation looks like, all with the ultimate goal of providing better service: ‘The law firm partnership structure doesn’t lend itself to helping innovation happen,’ he comments.

As such, Barclays has established an innovation consortium with around 30 law firms, which includes some not on Barclays’ panel. The aim is to encourage engagement and collaboration, while at the bank’s quarterly relationship meetings, law firms are asked what they are doing to innovate.

‘It was so telling to see 30 different firms with 30 different views as to what they thought innovation was, versus what they could be doing and how they could be managing it,’ Grant says. ‘Everybody is so closely guarded and hesitant about sharing knowledge which may lead to losing competitive advantage. But we’re saying the competitive advantage doesn’t come from innovation and technology – it’s what you do with that to then improve the service that you provide that differentiates.’

Grant, who was second in command to Barclays’ respected former head of external engagement, Stéphanie Hamon, before she left for Norton Rose Fulbright, set up the consortium as a part of Barclays’ final panel review exercise in 2018. In the same year, the bank launched its own legal technology incubator space as part of its network of 25 Eagle Labs: a 20-resident law tech incubator in London’s Notting Hill.

The programme was backed by 13 law firms and several other industry players including the Law Society, PwC, start-up community Legal Geek, as well as the University of Liverpool and University College London. It followed a handful of firms, such as Allen & Overy and Mischon de Reya, in opening such a space but was the first from the in-house side. Pinsent Masons partner Lucy Shurwood comments: ‘Chris is driving technology adoption by the legal team and the innovation agenda within Barclays’ legal team. He’s hot on innovation in legal and on the venture side in supporting start-ups and collaborating across clients, start-ups and law firms.’

Barclays also launched LawTech Bridge, alongside technology incubator CodeBase, as a series of meet-ups for those interested in the industry. The overall aim of this and the Eagle Lab initiative is to facilitate collaboration between legal tech start-ups, experts and law firms. ‘We’re successfully building an ecosystem in an environment where there’s a lot of interest in innovation and growing and changing the legal industry but there’s challenges to making it happen – law firms are not changing,’ Grant comments. ‘Some of the bigger ones may find it more difficult to change, but we are collaborating with a new cohort of partners to drive industry change and are refining the Lab’s partnership model to do this.’

He says the focus on technology and innovation was born out of the bank’s need to improve its operating model and have more certainty on cost, with Barclays’ overhaul of its adviser relationships understood to have saved the bank tens of millions of pounds. ‘We’re part of the business. We need to run legal as a business – that’s why we have legal operations.’