Collaboration is the name of the innovation game at Torys

At Torys, technology and innovation are a team sport. And like any team, input from rookies (junior associates) all the way up to celebrated veterans (senior partners and counsel) helps the coaching team put together a successful playbook.

Sukesh Kamra, the chief knowledge and innovation officer who’s steered the Torys team to a series of tech and innovation awards this year, is the team’s general manager. Speaking to CBA National, he emphasizes the importance of collaboration in developing solutions.

"It's the culture at Torys that allows the six of us to work together with our practicing lawyers," says Kamra, noting this culture fosters experimenting to "explore to then come to a solution to a pain point."

The six leaders he’s referring to include himself, Kayla Goldrich, director of practice management; Dustin Paterson, director of innovation; Clare Mauro, director of litigation; and e-discovery services, all in the Toronto office; along with managing partner Chris Fowles and senior associate Jessica Lumiere in Halifax.

Any efficiency enhancement project begins with understanding pain points. When he started at Torys a couple of years ago, Kamra launched an internal "listening tour" to meet lawyers at all levels across all practices to uncover inefficiencies and issues.

Mauro says a key part of the listening piece was hearing from associates and articling students who talk to their friends at other firms. Those conversations led to streamlining their e-discovery and review practices between Halifax-based subject matter experts and Toronto analysts.

Goldrich, who leads Torys’ practice management program, says the knowledge and innovation team conducts a focus group with some firm members about every six weeks.

“Sometimes we talk to them about a product, sometimes we pick their brain.”

Not only do the focus groups highlight issues and potential solutions, but they tend to get lawyers invested and “ready to champion our products,” she says.

To be clear, innovations need not always be complex or rely on generative artificial intelligence — they are often found in workflow and processes.

Fowles notes that the Halifax legal service centre supports other offices and is dedicated to repeated, recurring, volume-based work. So if they figure out how to do something even five minutes faster, “if we’re doing 1,000 of these documents every year, we’re saving 160 hours.”

For that reason, he says they’re always awake to improving processes to become more efficient and effective.

One of their cross-firm collaborations that recently won an award was a mergers and acquisitions competition law mapping tool. The knowledge and innovation team worked with the firm’s competition law group to create the first-ever advanced M&A geographic analysis product to help visualize different competitive market dynamics for particular regions in real time.

Although it was a brand new tech tool, it “had absolutely nothing to do with generative AI,” says Kamra.

It was, however, fairly typical of the firm’s approach to each project, which involves considering whether to build from scratch, buy off the shelf, or use a combo of buy and customize.

This time, the team purchased a tool and had their in-house developers take publicly available information to create a dynamic mapping program and “do things that you couldn’t do with Google,” says Kamra.

Paterson says the statistical analysis it generated formed the basis of a specific client’s arguments to the competition authorities. Even though it was created for a particular client, the team can now take what they invested in and learned through the process and use the mapping technology for other matters and other practice areas.

Torys won another legal tech innovation award this year for its side letter management tool, which the firm describes as “a state-of-the-art information management solution that fundamentally alters how we manage and maintain legal information for our clients.”

It was also created by a cross-functional team of developers, designers, data scientists and lawyers.

Not every innovation is directly related to client work, however. Paterson points to a deal study intended as a marketing tool created for the firm’s emerging companies and venture capital group. They leveraged publicly available information from various registries to identify venture capital deals. Torys' corporate searchers pulled these documents, and then trained an AI program to extract key information from them.

This was one of the early uses of natural language processing before generative AI was widely available. Lawyers then vetted and validated the answers. The process ultimately created a database that Torys' venture capital lawyers can now reference for market trends and deal points.

“That ended up turning into the deal study, which is still ongoing, and we're improving the process every year,” says Paterson.

On top of collaboration, education is crucial to the introduction and success of new technologies at Torys. The knowledge and innovation team includes educators, who Paterson notes are extremely important but often overlooked.

“It's not the case that if you build it, they will come. You really have to promote it and show [lawyers], walk them through and train them and tell them 4,567 times that this is really valuable.”

Lumiere says there’s probably a technology-related solution for every pain point the Torys team encounters, but every case, including the examples above, involves a substantial component of process innovation.

“I think it's important that part of the options are answers that always contemplate the process, not just can we fix it with technology,” she says.

“That workflow piece is incredibly important.”

While not every plan or project works out perfectly, “I don’t think we necessarily see things as failures,” says Goldrich, noting the firm’s culture allows experimentation without a fear of failure.

Karma says to get to best practices, they need to get to lessons learned.

“We're going to have the various paths—some that work, some that don't work—to get to lessons learned. It’s part of the pipeline creation because we're won’t get to something working really well until we figure out what works and what doesn't.”