Reinvent

Differentiate on innovation. Articulate a powerful value story for the firm’s innovation programme to engage clients and colleagues.

Think beyond technology. Create messages and frameworks to facilitate conversations about the true value of innovation to deliver better client outcomes, positioning Baker McKenzie as a pragmatic leader and advisor.

What we did: 

• Deep dive interviews into Baker McKenzie’s challenges revealed internal confusion and scepticism about the firm’s innovation programme. Interviews with partners and innovation leaders highlighted technical knowledge gaps and a lack of identified client need that was preventing confident communication.

• Conducted competitor analysis to understand how others are organising and communicating innovation and identify white space.

• Turned fragmented activity into a compelling proposition – pivoting from a message all about technology to one all about delivering certainty, speed, flexibility and quality. Comfortable ground for lawyers. 

• Defined Reinvent as the firm’s innovation platform – combining change initiatives and capabilities in support of better client outcomes.

• Tested ideas and messages with clients and colleagues to determine resonance and relevance.

• Developed sales enablement tools to help partners engage clients with confidence, including a client innovation matrix and personas to help tailor conversations about innovation to client priorities and capability – pioneer or pragmatist, beginner or optimist. Created conversation guides to flex the message, case studies and marketing materials tied to specific client goals to support an internal and external launch.

Key ideas: 

• What organisations need from their legal teams is changing. Facing disruption and heightened market complexity, businesses are looking for legal partners that can leverage the law faster, more accurately and with greater cost certainty.

• Meeting this challenge is about more than technology. Only a legal partner that understands the business can debunk tech myths and bring the best in innovative thinking and solutions to help clients achieve speed, certainty, flexibility and quality.

• Reinvent brings together the firm’s efforts to improve how services are delivered, develop next generation solutions to solve client challenges and engage the legal ecosystem in industry transformation. It captures an ongoing commitment to deliver better outcomes.

• Reinvent is relevant to all clients – not just the most innovative or tech-savvy. It is about how innovation is applied to best meet clients’ challenges and most important goals – whether they are looking to work in a new and bold way, or simply want to execute a specific legal mandate better and faster. 

Outcomes:

• Bigger: A value story for innovation greater than the sum of its parts. Partners were able to be proactive and confident in communicating with clients, and integrated alternative legal services, data and design thinking in live instructions. Buy-in and success led to bolder investments in transformative areas of AI and machine learning – cementing the firm’s aspiration to lead on innovation.

• Better: Outcome-focussed messages emphasised the benefit rather than the process of innovation – tapping into new client needs, goals and challenges. Client innovation matrix and personas enabled partners to give clients practical, specific advice tailored to their particular challenges.

• Faster: Organised Baker McKenzie’s capabilities and activities quickly and aligned a large and diverse partner population on a credible and robust direction.