
When Allen & Overy merged with New York-based Shearman & Sterling it created the third-largest law firm in the world. Has Fuse, the firm’s incubator and tech space, changed too? Artificial Lawyer spoke to Shruti Ajitsaria to find out.
Ajitsaria, a partner and head of Fuse, has been a leading light of the initiative since it started back in 2017, and she’s seen how things have evolved.
‘The firm is very different now, we have a huge number of offices. It’s really grown,’ London-based Ajitsaria said. ‘It was two very different firms, which are now one very large behemoth. So, the ability to have an impact now is huge and we also select [cohort members] as a merged firm.’
And ‘huge’ AOS (A&O Shearman) truly is: 7,000+ headcount, of which 4,000 are lawyers, and of those 800 are partners, spread across 47 offices globally, which in turn generates around $3.5 billion per year in revenue.
In the middle of this is Fuse, a project to bring legal tech, and more recently fintech, companies into the heart of the firm, allowing the startups and lawyers to both learn from each other.
Will all of this change the profile of the cohort members, which in the past has included the likes of Avvoka and Definely, and more recently Jigsaw and Juristic?
Ajitsaria noted that clearly the post-merger firm has a much greater US presence and its San Francisco office is playing a key role now as one of the two bases for Fuse cohort members alongside London.
Given that the Bay Area is the tech capital of the planet and home to many of the world’s leading genAI companies, then this could make a difference.
‘We had about 230 applications last year,’ Ajitsaria explained, with six legal tech companies chosen as part of the open application process. There were also plenty of companies joining from the fintech and digital currency field, who are there not to help the lawyers per se with their work, but rather to help them get insights into the needs of their clients and where they’re heading in tech terms.
Going back to the legal tech companies, what is Ajitsaria most excited about?
‘We are really interested to hear from companies in stealth. We hope having the San Francisco base will make things different, and I’d like to see very early-stage moon shot companies that maybe need guidance,’ she noted, and mentioned Avvoka, which joined early on and has since developed a lot – and also became part of AOS’s tech stack.
(Interestingly, the firm has stated that ‘eight of the 12 legal tech tools in A&O Shearman’s toolkit are from companies who have participated in Fuse’.)
There will also be some more well-known companies chosen, so not all start-ups, but it’s clear what really excites Ajitsaria is the unknown, i.e. that some pioneering start-up, perhaps not yet in the market consciousness, will join, bringing with it a new perspective and new capabilities – even if needing some nurturing still. And what better place to do that than inside the third largest law firm on the planet?
She added that naturally genAI will be a key component of the new cohort, as ‘it’s still nascent, even if it’s taken off now’. Plus, where genAI for the legal world is heading now will also be of great interest.
However, Ajitsaria underlined that despite the focus on new tech and pioneering startups, at the end of the day it’s all about solving ‘common problems that all law firms would recognise’. That said, the solutions to those problems may not be obvious and new companies may have to come up with very novel solutions no-one else in the legal world had thought of before.
Of course, solving some of the legal world’s most long-term problems and doing so with very high accuracy and great efficiency….and perhaps with an approach others have not tried before, is not easy. Yet, clearly this is one of the reasons why Fuse was started: to find such companies.
‘What I find most fascinating is the unknown. Law firms have too much hubris. We need to look outside,’ Ajitsaria concluded.
So, if you are building something that can make a difference and would like to apply, you can find more information here.
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If the frontier of legal innovation excites you, then come along to the Legal Innovators California conference, the pioneering legal tech event taking place over two days in central SF – June 11 and 12.
See here for more details.
