Innovation | Stephenson Harwood

In today’s fast-paced and increasingly digital world, innovation plays a key part in the services we provide to our clients.

With an expert central innovation team - comprised of legal project management, process improvement, legal operations, and legal technology professionals - Stephenson Harwood delivers new answers to longstanding challenges, using a carefully curated range of tools to deliver legal advice in a way that achieves the best outcomes for our clients.

Applying a holistic approach to the issues clients face, from advice and content through to delivery, Stephenson Harwood marries sophisticated legal advice, market leading technology and critical thinking to provide support aligned with each client's specific challenges, risks and opportunities.

What innovation means to our clients

A decrease in cost

Realising efficiencies takes effort out of our matter delivery processes and reduced effort is a win-win scenario for us and our clients. It means less ‘time on the clock’ for clients, helping consistently meet your expectations in terms of legal fees.

Improved client efficiencies

Where possible, we take a holistic view of what we do for our clients. By focusing on the end to end process, we design what we do to seamlessly fit into our clients internal processes.

Faster turnaround times

Faster turnaround times We understand the pressures you are under, and know that your deadline isn’t subject to negotiation. Our solutions help our teams consistently meet these deadlines, with no impact on quality.

Additional insights

Leveraging technology can allow us to increase the scope of work that we undertake for clients, for no additional cost. This means better management of risk, and additional insights. Our solutions typically allow us, and our clients, to capture data in a structured manner – which can subsequently be interrogated to provide insights to generate additional business value.

Improved consistency

Through defining and documenting best-practice processes, and using technology to support the delivery of the process-driven components of our work, we are better able to ensure a consistent high quality experience for our clients.

Improved transparency

Giving clients real time status updates on everything from the status of individual documents, to the progress of a workstream to the latest WIP and invoice figures – all available whenever our clients need to access it, wherever they are.

Our innovation capabilities

Process Improvement

We have a dedicated process improvement team. Using Lean 6 Sigma methodologies, they work with our teams of transactional lawyers to redesign our matter delivery process - optimising how we do things to deliver the most value to the client, as efficiently as possible.

Legal Project Management

We have a Legal Project Management team, who support our largest and most complex matters. The project management approach and legal technology know-how that they provide is combined with our lawyers' knowledge and expertise to bring the best possible service to our clients.

Digital

Digital encompasses the technology platforms that we use to support the delivery of services, and our teams dedicated to supporting their use by lawyers and clients.

Our core technology platforms include:

Generative AI technology, as either standalone legal specific platforms, or embedded in other platforms to provide additional functionality
We also have the capability to build custom solutions for clients, including custom Generative AI solutions
Disclosure platforms, including Technology Assisted Review functionality.
AI document review software.
Data analytics platforms
Document automation tools
On-line transaction management tools
Advanced bundling and bibling solution
Automated proof reading tools
Client collaboration technology
In addition to these, we have a team dedicated to identifying and evaluating emerging technologies.

Case Studies

Our clients were under a lot of pressure to meet a deadline to ensure their IT contracts complied with the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).

Solution

We build a custom contract review solution within our Generative AI platform, SHarper AI. The custom solution supports the work undertaken by the firm’s lawyers and delivers text extraction, legal analysis and reporting functionality tailored to the specific needs of our clients in the context of their DORA compliance work.

Impact

Our solution has enabled us to speed up our review time while continuing to deliver the same high quality service. This has resulted in us being able to handle a higher volume more efficiently, and has led to more certainty on fees for clients

Our client, a leading global investment fund, wanted to accelerate transaction process time to improve liquidity.

Solution

We worked closely with the client to determine where efficiencies could be gained from both an internal and an external perspective. As a result of the collaborative review, we: developed new template form documents, which achieved the client’s initial goal of speeding-up its negotiation process; helped the client replace its lease summary documents with new versions, allowing for formatted data to be brought into the client’s IT system sooner; and created a new cloud-based platform to enable the client to better track the progress of its lease transactions. We continue to work alongside this client to further improve its transaction and stakeholder management processes.

Impact

As a result of our collaborative project we improved transaction processing time by 23%.

Our internal eDisclosure team assisted on a High Court dispute which involved the time critical review of c.80,000 documents. A pressing deadline meant traditional approaches to using technology to support the work were not viable.

Solution

We deployed Technology Assisted Review or TAR. TAR uses Artificial Intelligence to classify documents, based on input from expert reviewers. TAR was used to prioritise the documents that we reviewed, prioritising the human review of documents that it deemed most likely to be relevant to the case. The technology was run over the c. 80,000 document set. After a couple of training rounds the TAR analysis model determined that only a small number of documents (around 14,000) were likely to be relevant. As the review progressed, we expanded the training rounds to further improve the accuracy of the model.

Impact

Taking this approach enabled us to support our client meeting the court deadlines, in a manner that saved 16 weeks of review effort and cost.

Transaction management in aircraft finance and leasing deals is a time consuming activity for us and for our clients, with multiple opportunities for in-efficiencies.

Solution

We worked with clients and counterparties on the development of process mapping and technology solutions to streamline and standardise the process for aircraft deliveries. In combination with the streamlined process, our team now uses a combination of: document automation software; cloud based transaction management software; and bible production software.

Impact

Our solutions reduced the time take to produce first draft documents by over 50%, reduced email traffic by 70%, and improved the visibility on deal status for client and counterparty contract managers. Overall, this approach has enabled us to manage a larger volume of deals and has allowed our clients to free up internal resource for other projects.

Streamlining Group Action Claims

Solution

We implement a structured approach to streamline processes and enhance client collaboration in these claims.

Key roles are defined to ensure efficient task allocation. An approvals tracker was developed to facilitate client instructions, requiring only majority approval. We utilise HighQ to create secure portals for sharing key data, with dedicated sub-sites for private client information. Steering committees are formed to oversee claims, with fortnightly meeting for updates and client engagement.

Billing and cost tracking are optimised with clear guidelines, automated tracking and monthly dashboards, ensuring transparency and alignment with client expectations.

Impact

The clients’ aims are achieved by providing key data access and decision-making involvement through the portals, approval tracker, and meetings. Cost dashboards and streamlined billing processes reduce email communication and allow clients to monitor costs efficiently

In order to undertake construction activities in the UK, our client needed to submit hundreds of visa applications to the UK Home Office over a short period of time. The volume of applications would have typically meant thousands of emails and documents being shared between us and the client's representatives, with the inherent inefficiencies for us, our clients representatives and our client.

Solution

We created a bespoke portal which includes an interactive and automated database that allows us to facilitate and conduct the work much more efficiently and cost-effectively. The portal included automated workflows, dynamic visualisations allowing our client to track the progress of work in real-time and tailored alerts and notifications based upon specific actions.

Impact

The solution allowed us to significantly reduce email traffic, manage sensitive documentation securely, and speed up the processing time involved with each application. We reduced friction points and focused on optimising the experience for our client and their employees.