About

Team size: 20

Major legal advisers: Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang, Hogan Lovells

‘Rob Booth has invested extraordinary energy in the past year in helping to change the way that lawyers collaborate to create value,’ Hogan Lovells partner Charles Brasted comments. ‘Built on the value model that he introduced into The Crown Estate’s legal panel, his Bionic Lawyer Project is a model of collaboration, innovation and breaking down boundaries.’

In late 2018, Crown Estate GC Booth, Hogan Lovells’ then global head of legal operations (now head of innovation and digital), Stephen Allen, and Stéphanie Hamon (ex-Barclays, now Norton Rose Fulbright), co-founded what they describe as a ‘do tank rather than a think tank’. The result, the much-talked about Bionic Lawyer Project, has brought together a group of more than 250 people hailing from inside and outside the legal industry, including technology companies, New Law, commentators and academics.

The project aims to devise creative and effective ways to look at the legal industry through a combination of design thinking, behavioural and scientific approaches. That results in a series of documents and resources for institutions to act as a blueprint for doing business in a better way and provide guidance on what good business looks like. ‘We’re trying to use collaboration to unlock the value in the legal industry. We are convinced that there is a huge potential there,’ Booth says. ‘The group has a genuine commitment to people, processes and technology, and is trying to crowdsource and then open-source ways of doing things better.’

The project draws plaudits from across the industry, with Booth and the Bionic Lawyer receiving the equal-highest number of Powerlist nominations. In practice, the project is using 16 ‘sprint teams’ working on different themes to finalise a model for the future, which is then intended to be shared as widely as possible. Topics range from ‘I have valuable customer and market insights at my fingertips’ to ‘I have a voice to challenge the status quo’ and ‘I can map outcomes combining my human judgement with evidence-based analysis’.

Participants come from a variety of organisations that The Crown Estate has worked with and were initially selected through a process Booth refers to as the ‘good egg system’, where people suggest someone who would be willing to give their time and contribute to the project. This enabled Booth and Allen to grow the network fairly quickly. ‘Some people have struggled to fully buy into it, but once people got under the skin of what we’re trying to do, the reception has been very positive,’ adds Booth.