Legal Week Intelligence, in association with Fulcrum GT, recently published the first edition of its Top 20 Legal IT Innovators report, which profiles the law firm leaders, in-house lawyers and tech pioneers driving change in the legal profession.

Craig Courter is global COO at Baker McKenzie, one of the world's largest law firms, with more than 4,600 full-time lawyers in 77 offices across 47 countries. With that spread of responsibility, Courter needs to be innovative.

The seeds of his innovative thinking were sown early. "I was particularly lucky because I learned to programme in high school in 1969. I left school knowing six programming languages and have always enjoyed, as a hobby, programming and staying current with the field: you get an intuitive feeling of whether something can be done or not, because you can actually go do it."

His hobby soon paid off. "I was in the navy for six years and went to law school at night," he says. "When I started practising law in 1986, the firm I worked at didn't have a computer; we had memory typewriters but that was it. I suggested replacing the old red Lexis terminal with a personal computer: the partners at my firm (in San Diego) took a risk and we did." The investment worked. He then encouraged his firm to invest in a local area network and later, barcode technology.

"In the mid-1990s, we ran many trials and hearings with barcode-driven computer technology. That's not because the partners said: 'here's a good idea, go do it'. It's because they listened to people like me, who had our finger on the pulse both of what technology could do and how to practice law, and could marry the two together. They took a risk, let us do it and it turned out to be successful."

Courter has been at the forefront of innovation ever since. So how does he see it in practice today at Baker McKenzie? "Innovation is critical and technology is probably the great leveller because it's not that expensive to get into. Until a few years ago, law firms weren't particularly innovative; just recycling ideas that our clients and the big accounting firms had had for years. For the legal field those ideas were innovative, because we were a little bit behind, especially in technology."

Whereas in AI, "nobody is really ahead", he says. "It's a very young industry, it's got law firms' attention early in its hype cycle, so this may be an area where we're going to be innovators, rather than just reinventing what our clients and other companies do. With AI and cognitive computing, we have a chance of running, not at the front of the pack, but not very far behind the front of the pack. It remains to be seen how good a job we do using this technology in our practices."

Courter is looking "very seriously" at AI: the firm is seeking to use AI approaches in its billing system, in document review and in contract analysis. "We have many other ideas that we are pursuing related to AI," he reveals, "from uses of AI in the provision of legal services, to something that I'm very interested in, which is the uses of true machine learning in the efficient delivery of law firm operations." However, he concedes that AI "will force law firms to change and adapt" and this may require fewer lawyers "in the longer term".

Using technology, Courter explains, enables the firm to focus on connecting with clients – anywhere, anytime. In collaboration and knowledge sharing, the real innovation is in proprietary systems such as Baker McKenzie Online, an extranet which, among other features, allows clients to access a document simultaneously with lawyers, to co-edit it and to see each other's edits.

AI will force law firms to change and adapt, and this may require fewer lawyers in the longer term

There are also knowledge-sharing products developed by the firm, including the award-winning Global Merger and Acquisition Planner. This helps companies doing multi-jurisdictional acquisitions to analyse competition and antitrust rules across jurisdictions.

"Clients need to be getting answers to questions very quickly and technology is a great enabler. They want to get the same level of service and the same capabilities and seamless delivery of service, wherever they are being served by Baker McKenzie. We do a lot of things to try and make sure that is the client experience. And yes, you absolutely need to be innovative in order to give the clients what they require and what they deserve."

So what are the expectations? "Clients expect us to be innovative in legal knowledge, legal arguments, legal theories and the practice of law. We are very innovative in that. Clients also want us to be innovative in service delivery as well, because they're under huge cost pressures and we need to be as innovative as we can to try to assist them: to do it better, faster and cheaper."

He identifies the firm's Global Services Manila, a shared services centre established in 2000, as being extremely innovative – the first of its kind. "That allowed us to do a lot more with less dollar resources." It was followed last year by an additional centre in Belfast, adding legal services to the firm's shared services offerings, with more than 850 staff in Manila and Belfast approaching 200.

Courter is keen to develop a culture of innovation among young lawyers and professional staff. "A leader in an innovative organisation needs to be open to ideas that aren't his or hers – that they can just help others develop," he says. "Young lawyers are already innovators and what we have to do is pay attention to them. We have some very specific examples of that, including AI-based technology that one of our associates has developed. I can't talk about the detail now but we are very encouraging of that."

Many lawyers toward the end of their career, he suggests, "can run Word, do email, and otherwise make their computer work". But he adds: "They really don't have an intuitive sense for why the computer works that way."

He points, by contrast, to: "The generation of lawyers that we're hiring now: they've always had computers, they understand how they operate. It's just second nature to them, they know how to do it. They may not be programmers but they have probably done some programming in their career and they say not only, 'boy, I am frustrated because this is really inefficient', but they are also able to say: 'here's a better way to do it'."

To remain innovative, he admits, "is really hard", adding: "Because with the COO hat on, you're torn between efficiency in operations and innovation. And if you're designing an organisation to be innovative, you would design it differently than one that needed to be ruthlessly efficient. If we wanted to truly be innovative in every aspect, then we would probably have more groups of people who were allowed to work on ideas independently, without significant standards, and let a thousand flowers bloom. There's a little bit of tension in how you need to run an organisation to be efficient and how you want to make sure you are at least getting some level of innovation in what you're doing."