FT Collaborative Innovation Award
Over the past 5 years RSGI has seen a significant rise in collaborative working to solve legal problems. Whether it’s collaboration between different teams and skillsets in a law firm, in-house legal teams and business partners, or between legal organisations, there are countless examples of collaboration leading to novel and exciting outcomes.
We have blockchain company Integra Ledger to thank for inspiring us to take this idea further and launch a dedicated award with the Financial Times. We set the industry a challenge: come together in groups of 3+ organisations and use your collective power and digital innovation to solve a challenge that can’t be tackled alone. This was an unusual award, rewarding ideas that had reached a minimum viable project, but more importantly showed potential for massive impact going forward.
We are delighted to say the results were outstanding. Below are the 15 projects that made the shortlist:
You can read RSGI content director Mary Ormerod’s take on the Collaborative Innovation projects in the Financial Times here.
CAN Comply — digitising derivatives regulatory compliance
Organisations: Factor; Acadia; MayerBrown
Description: Regulatory compliance for derivatives documentation is essential for secure capital markets. But it’s also highly complex, often inefficient and there are significant fines for regulatory breaches. This collaboration aims to implement a digitised, standardised and systematic approach for derivatives documentation management.
DriveChain — genuinely smart documents using blockchain
Organisations: Hogan Lovells; BNP Paribas Real Estate, UK; Integra Ledger*
Description: This software extracts and exports data from any document, contract or deed in any industry or practice area. It removes the need to read and re-read documents and produces summaries. DriveChain has ecosystem wide compatibility and data is held securely on Integra’s blockchain technology.
Immigration4Ukraine — pro bono legal aid for Ukrainian refugees
Organisations: Individuals from legal tech companies, law firms, in-house teams, and charities initiated the project; UPJ and Pro Bono Germany have now taken on the lead role of co-ordination
Description: Following the Ukrainian refugee crisis, around 25 organisations including law firms, pro bono charities, universities and legal design and technology firms are collaborating to offer legal help to those fleeing the war. Using a simple online portal, country specific legal advice is accessible to refugees. So-far, over 10,000 people have been reached.
Integrity Distributed — sharing intelligence to predict compliance breaches (Winner: Digital Innovation award)
Organisations: Kona AI; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Harvard; Integra Ledger*; Davis Polk; Covington & Burling; Paul Hastings; Debevoise & Plimpton; Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
Description: Corruption costs US$3.6 trillion a year. This collaboration has created a technology platform for global organisations to share anti-fraud and corruption intelligence. It uses AI to train algorithms, contributing to an iterative and collaborative ‘super-algorithm’ that detects patterns of fraud and corruption.
Legal Metrics Portal — a common language for legal operations data (Winner: Industry Impact award)
Collaborators: PwC NewLaw Australia; Elevate; LegalOps.com; NetApp; Is Inspired
This global collaboration of lawyers, legal operations professionals, technologists, data scientists and designers won the award for industry impact. It allows legal departments to make data driven decisions by extracting and visualising spend analytics using a comprehensive set of metrics and their definitions.
Legal Opinions on a Blockchain — legal opinions marketplace for close-out netting
Collaborators: D2LT; Standard Chartered; Juris Corp; SETL; 3 Hare Court
Posting regulatory capital based on the net-value rather than the gross value allows banks to reduce capital requirements by as much as 80%. However, this requires potentially expensive external legal opinions of insolvency law analysis. This innovation creates a marketplace on a distributed ledger where finance institutions can search for cost saving close-out netting legal opinions.
Legal Tech Platform — Leading a nationwide transformation
Collaborators: Lupl (collaboration of six law firms and 16 legal departments); Singapore Ministry of Law
A platform which provides a virtual workspace for legal professionals, interacting and engaging with the Law Society of Singapore, Singapore Courts and the Singapore Acadamy of Law. It is hosted on a physical server and integrates with commons functions such as Tesseract and Clio.
MariTime track app — efficiency in relationships
Collaborators: Eversheds Sutherland; Wärtsilä; Fliplet
An app to bring departments and teams together on complex multi-party negotiations, organising the deal-making process. Applied to the maritime industry as a case study, the app aims to aid business collaboration across all sectors.
Node2Node: A journey of wine, US to UK — digitising supply chains
Collaborators: K&L Gates; Chainvine; Fetzer Vineyards; Wine Institute; University of Surrey Business School; HMRC; UK Food Standards Agency
Chainvine’s blockchain platform aims to digitise the wine supply chain, making it more secure and transparent. It increases compliance and paperless cost savings. It has been successfully tested by transporting a shipment of Californian wine from the USA to the UK.
OneNDA and beyond – innovation through standardisation (Winner: Design and Innovation award)
Collaborators: TLB; Diageo; PwC UK; UBS; Panasonic; easyJet; International Air Transport Association; Seadrill; Barclays; Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, Bupa; Remitly; Deliveroo; Linklaters; Gilbert + Tobin; Allen & Overy; Hexcel; and others
This project created an open-source standard-form NDA for the legal community to reduce legal work and increase transparency. The project includes 1,100 members spanning 44 countries. oneNDA solves for 95% of NDAs and plans to incorporate a finance scenario to tackle the other 5%. It took home the award for Design and Innovation in Collaboration.
The Open Cap Table Coalition — standardising capitalisation data for start-ups
Collaborators: Latham & Watkins; Carta; Cooley; Fenwick & West; Goodwin Procter; Gunderson Dettmer; LTSE; Morgan Stanley — Shareworks; Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
Every start-up needs to keep a capitalisation table, a complex record of securities including common and preferred stock, options and warrants. The Open Cap Table standardises this information to improve transparency and portability of start-up capitalisation data.
Project Genie — digital dispute prevention strategy
Collaborators: Pinsent Masons; Yulchon; Solomon Strategic Consulting
Dispute resolution in the construction industry depends on the quality of the audit trail. This has historically been underinvested and poorly drafted, resulting in costly mistakes. This collaboration has created a digitised contract with checklists allowing for contract compliance and a quality audit trail.
SafeShare — secure data sharing in the healthcare sector
Collaborators: Genesis.studio; Novartis; The GovLab; VdA — Vieira de Almeida
In the proof-of-concept stage, this innovation aims to provide an efficient and sustainable means to share data in the healthcare sector, using distributed ledger and smart contract technology.
PLEAD — simplifying access to online training for legal teams
Collaborators: Unilever, Mayer Brown, Integra Ledger*
This collaboration creates one online catalogue for CLE and CPD courses, providing universal registration with standardised and portable course credits. Registered on the blockchain, it provides smart identity authentication and certificate of completion, verifiable by anyone. No complex software is necessary.
SmartESG Blockchain App — automating ESG standards
Collaborators: PwC Consulting; Integra Ledger*; WorldCC
ESG metrics are generally reported through lengthy and labour intensive questionnaires. This collaboration universalises and automates ESG questionnaires. Processes high volumes of ESG questionnaires and validates them through blockchain technology. Identified risks can be fed into a CRM system or triaged for a risk review.