Harnessing AI & Innovation for the Legal Sector

Our approach is customised for the legal sector, focusing on the unique challenges and opportunities it presents. Key activities and milestones in our engagements include:

Initial assessment

Assess (define) organisational objectives and strategy:

• Evaluate whether clear and measurable goals are established and understood across the organisation in relation to Innovation.
• If such goals do not exist, collaborate with key leaders to develop a vision supported by a strategy and objectives aligned around the 7 Dimensions of Strategic Advantage.
• This step ensures that all subsequent actions and initiatives are aligned with the overarching strategic vision, providing a clear roadmap for innovation.

Framework application

Impact assessment:

• Apply the framework to assess the potential impacts (both positive and negative) of AI and similar innovations across various service lines.
• Impact Definition: Define how AI and similar EmTech advancements might affect the organisation. A negative impact is seen as a threat, while a positive impact is viewed as an opportunity.
• Focus on each of the dimensions across Client Engagement, Operational Efficiency, Risk Management, Data-driven Decisions, Agility, User Experience, and Revenue Growth.
• A mix of workshops and stakeholder interviews are used to identify specific impacts and associated operating model / strategic challenges.
• For example, a firm might identify that AI could streamline contract review processes, reducing time by 30% but requiring a significant change in how legal teams are structured, necessitating parallel change activities.

Idea generation:

• After understanding the impacts, generate ideas and proposals that align with these impacts to mitigate threats and capitalise on opportunities.
• Shift the approach towards creation of a high quantity of ideas, ensuring broad coverage of potential solutions at this stage.
• To ensure alignment of the goals to the organisation’s strategic objectives, spend time analysing the insights from the impacts, ensuring the opportunity statements created to ideate around are aligned to the impacts identified and the organisational objectives.
• For example, an imapct of falling revenue and an organisational goal of growing revenue by X% will ensure the opportunity statement is aligned to ideas to increase revenue.
• This step also involves filtering and categorising ideas to ensure they are relevant and actionable, helping the firm to focus on high-impact initiatives.

Engagement method

Inclusive collaboration:

• Engage staff and colleagues across all levels of the organisation through workshops and interviews to ensure cross-spectrum involvement and facilitation of the broadest set of inputs.
• Foster a culture of innovation by encouraging active participation and collaboration, ensuring that the insights gathered are comprehensive and reflective of the entire organisation.
• Workshops should be approached with a mixture of ‘silent and solo’ work coupled with group discussion to ensure a broad range of voices and working styles can be accommodated.
• This mixed approach allows for both individual creativity and collective brainstorming, ensuring that no valuable insights are overlooked.

Building the portfolio & innovation pipeline

Prioritisation of initiatives:

• Develop an innovation pipeline to manage and track the progress of new ideas and technologies.
• Prioritise potential solutions based on their impact and the effort required to implement them. Note, at this stage the initiatives are likely not refined.
• To prioritise the high quantity of proposals generated from the earlier process steps, a cross functional team will be engaged to both refine and weight / score each item.
• A variety of frameworks can be used in support of this from simple “impact vs effort” matrices to more detailed approaches like “RICE” (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) or “WSJF” (Weighted Shortest Job First) by means of creating a visual representation of where initiatives stand.
• Specific frameworks and the application of one of Mozaic’s proprietary weighting mechanisms are determined case-by-case in collaboration with the organisation, ensuring appropriate robustness.
• Historic data can also be used to support this process such as looking at similar initiatives done previously. This can help, for example, when looking at ‘Confidence’ within RICE or ‘Development Size’ in WSJF.
• It is expected that out of this process the high quantity of initiatives – tactical and strategic – originally generated will be whittled down into a selection the team believes (at this stage) will deliver highest value to the organisation.

Impact and effort definition:

• Impact: Consider how closely an initiative aligns with the organisation’s strategic objectives (e.g. OKRs) and its potential to achieve those goals.
  • For instance, aligning an idea with strategic objectives might involve scaling an in- house developed tool to offer a SaaS solution to clients, offering a new revenue stream which could support broader firm goals while also being practical in terms of resource allocation.
• Effort: Evaluate the resources, time, cost, and complexity required to implement the initiative.
  • Effort measurements will be tailored appropriately to align with internal metrics and tooling (e.g. smallest time recording units). This could include leveraging historical project data to better estimate resource allocation and potential bottlenecks, ensuring a realistic and actionable plan.

Strategic initiatives

Refining the portfolio:

• Refine the highest-value work generated during the ideation phase to ensure they are feasible, desirable, and viable. Generate associated business justifications / cases to underpin investment decisions.
• This will allow a more comprehensive iteration of the portfolio to be created and fuller understanding of dependencies and constraints to be articulated.

Implementation and continuous delivery:

• A product-centric approach is highly recommended to focus on delivering value continuously through iterative development, ensuring that work types / services are continually refined based on client feedback and market changes. Where organisational or operating model maturity is required to enable this, it should have been built in to the holistic change portfolio through the refinement process.
• An example of the above, could be the introduction of a whole new revenue-generating service and the recruitment, training, technology, marketing etc that would be needed in order to deliver this to market.
• By implementing a continuous cycle of building, testing, and iterating on the design and solution, a focus can be maintained on early and continuous delivery of valuable outcomes.
• Provide ongoing guidance, support, training, and resources to ensure successful integration of new tools and methodologies across the firm.