Theo Ling is a Partner at Baker McKenzie, a leading firm whose counsel helps clients navigate uncertainty. Relentlessly creative, curious, and dissatisfied with the status quo in legal services delivery, Mr. Ling was recently recognised as one of North America's Top 10 Innovative Lawyers by The Financial Times. He holds a unique perspective on legal innovation and collaboration both as a member of Baker McKenzie's Innovation Committee and as the creative force behind Whitespace Legal Collab, the Firm's recently launched intrapreneurial venture.
What motivates you?
I'm always analysing and questioning the status quo, exploring how things could be done better, and discovering with whom I might collaborate to solve a problem that hasn't been solved before. I am fascinated by the creative process and captivated by how others' viewpoints, knowledge, and skills improve solutions. This explains why I became so motivated to develop a legal services laboratory at Baker McKenzie, where clients, lawyers, designers, knowledge managers, and many others could come together to tackle tough problems that couldn't be resolved without everyone's perspective and contextual understanding.
How is the launch of Whitespace Legal Collab a game changer?
Whitespace Legal Collab stems from the major lesson I learned building the award-winning iG360 end-to-end compliance tool: that the right people working together to solve the right problem, in the right environment is a game changer. Whitespace Legal Collab is the only innovation lab at a global law firm devoted exclusively to such potentially transformative multidisciplinary collaborations.
The Collab, launched in June to kudos from our clients, our business and academic partners, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, provides optimal conditions for creative problem solving using collaborative innovation methods, thereby enabling in-house counsel to solve tough problems they cannot easily address on their own. In addition, the Collab connects Baker McKenzie and our clients with a diverse community of remarkable people in business, law, technology, and other disciplines. This community's shared attribute is the intrinsic motivation to improve how legal services are delivered and consumed.
Teams assembled by the Collab include innovative lawyers from Baker McKenzie and our clients. They also include selected academics, business strategists, data visualisation professionals, IT whizzes, service designers, software programmers, and user experience experts. Our unique approach harnesses well-curated networks to develop powerful and easy-to-use legal solutions that we anticipate will come to define the future of law.
How does Whitespace Legal Collab reduce the inherent stresses of innovation?
From a human perspective, making transformative ideas come to life is difficult especially when there's no community to lean on. The essence of Whitespace Legal Collab is to redefine what collaboration means in the legal profession. The Collab increases the chances of innovation success by supporting its growing community to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and experience of legal services delivery.
Most often, clients come to us or we go to them with a shared legal services delivery problem. The Collab works with clients to target a pressing challenge; it assembles a multidisciplinary team with an effective mix of knowledge, skills, and perspective to make inroads, and conceives and prototypes a promising solution testing it with a small group of users.
The Collab runs immersive training experiences to help clients learn about business, legal, and technology opportunities in areas such as data analytics, data visualisation, machine learning, and innovation writ large, as well as optimal ways to establish multidisciplinary collaborations. It also supports Baker McKenzie's training and talent capabilities, so that the next generation of lawyers will become more adept at advising clients against a backdrop of turbulence.
Finally, the Collab demonstrates thought leadership, which inspires clients and others to be more strategic about transformational business opportunities and important legal risks related to smart cities, data privacy, and more.
How enthusiastic are clients about your ground-breaking collaborative approach?
There are numerous innovation labs, hubs, and spaces in the marketplace, a lot of noise, and a lack of substance. We take a wide and deep, practical and ambitious, view of multidisciplinary collaboration. This is why clients are very interested, particularly those that are ahead of the curve in their respective industries. These clients' businesses are shaping the future of work, fostering collaboration-oriented cultures, and taking steps to ensure that how they practice law demonstrates leadership to innovative peers outside the legal silo.
Why do innovators find Whitespace Legal Collab compelling?
Baker McKenzie's global footprint and wide-ranging legal domain expertise, which support closer and more impactful collaborations with us and with our clients, are a magnet for innovators.
The Collab's staffing attracts innovators' attention as well. For example, Sanjay Khanna, Director and Futurist of the Collab, is a strategic foresight expert who brings world-class interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary expertise around global trends and scenarios, enhancing the level of creativity and potential impact we bring to collaboration.
Technology leaders IBM and SAS, as well as academic institutions such as the University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo, and York University, love our open innovation approach, which welcomes and highly values diverse expertise.
The key here is a mutually rewarding flow of talent and capabilities that allows: emerging technology to be leveraged; workflows and user experience to be redesigned; data to be structured more logically; deeper insights to be generated through visual and natural language storytelling; and more integrated solutions to be delivered.
What role does Whitespace Legal Collab play in Baker McKenzie's strategic plan?
Last year Global Chair Paul Rawlinson stated that innovation is one of the three key drivers of Baker McKenzie's strategic plan. Soon afterwards, the Firm's innovation committee assessed proposals for new innovation labs worldwide of which Whitespace Legal Collab is the first.
The Collab is therefore a flag bearer of Baker McKenzie's innovation agenda. The Collab does at least five things that align with that agenda:
• Works together with clients to design new approaches to legal services delivery;
• Solves problems at the intersection of business, law, technology, and other disciplines that require all-star expertise and collaboration skills;
• Engages our lawyers, students, and professional staff;
• Broadens talent and recruiting opportunities; and
• Creates immersive learning experiences that foster new skills lawyers need to help clients be more successful.
Culture change is needed for legal innovation to take root at law firms. How does Whitespace Legal Collab help Baker McKenzie lawyers feel involved with the Firm's global innovation efforts?
Whitespace Legal Collab enables Baker McKenzie lawyers to be an integral part of the Firm's proactive culture change. The Collab affirms to clients that Baker McKenzie lawyers are positioned to:
• Speak knowledgeably about the Firm's legal innovation approach;
• Listen to real-world business, operational, and legal innovation challenges; and
• Explore an intriguing problem in a dedicated innovation space and identify a potential solution.
In addition, the Collab is an arrow in the Firm's talent recruitment and retention quiver, enabling Baker McKenzie to attract new talent, provide lawyers with dedicated time in a living legal services laboratory, and compete effectively for innovation-minded talent.
What makes Whitespace Legal Collab an asset for next-generation legal talent?
Today our lawyers help clients navigate increasing uncertainty in a globalised world facing heightened risk. Some of that complexity and uncertainty revolves around disruptive innovation and new ways of working. Young talent in particular sees exciting possibilities at Baker McKenzie because of the Collab's ability to identify and foster the emerging capabilities for The New Lawyer. The New Lawyer is an aspect of Baker McKenzie's brand positioning that conveys our Firm's aspiration to be the partner and trusted advisor of choice for clients facing a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
Provide examples of how Baker McKenzie Partners and other experienced lawyers are becoming involved with Whitespace Legal Collab.
We have some terrific examples of Baker McKenzie lawyers bringing clients to Whitespace Legal Collab to explore major legal services delivery challenges and opportunities.
For example, a Partner who manages a relationship with a major life insurer asked the Collab to help them develop ideas for a new innovation-related centre of excellence.
Another Partner who manages a relationship with a financial institution brought us in to help them explore how data science will open up innovation opportunities and risks.
As a final example, a Partner working with one of the world's major technology firms supported us in assisting his client with innovation challenges related to commercial M&A challenges.
The Collab welcomes opportunities where Baker McKenzie lawyers bring a client challenge to the Collab and explore whether that challenge is right for the client, the Firm, and the Collab to engage with.
What are some other ways you're making an impact?
Earlier this year, Baker McKenzie's Global Technology, Media, and Telecommunications industry group was looking for a way to involve lawyers, engage clients, work with other areas of domain expertise, and seed ideas to scale in practice. Working with the global industry group, Whitespace Legal Collab helped conceive the Innovation-in-Motion Awards (the IMA) as a five-month extended competition that aims to drive positive change in the practice of law.
The goal of the IMA exercise is to re-imagine and improve how we deliver legal services to our clients and become a better partner for them using approaches such as co-creation, empathic listening, fast iteration of ideas, and multidisciplinary collaboration. It offers our talent and select clients a unique opportunity to collaborate in new ways to address actual client-identified challenges.
The calibre of the market-leading clients is impressive. Ten teams are competing with each one made up of Baker McKenzie individuals, clients, and external domain experts that teams choose to add (such as data analysts, system engineers, and user experience experts). Client-identified challenges are diverse and inspired: they range from applying machine learning in order to deliver tailored legal alerts, to re-designing terms and conditions in a consumer-friendly format, to creating a technology-driven privacy compliance tool.
Innovation is a journey and we need to train our talent and have them beside us. The IMA facilitates this process. It enables both lawyers and non-lawyers to work across organisational siloes, to challenge set ways of thinking and working, to build and strengthen relationships with clients, and to try something they have never done before but will be expected to do in the years ahead. The IMA are an example of an activity that reveals the power of the Collab to be an agent of change while highlighting to our clients and people how serious Baker McKenzie is about innovation as a source of market leadership.
