Like a growing number of law firms around the country, Fenwick & West isn't just looking to buy legal technology. If it sees a client or attorney need that can be solved by a technology not yet available, it creates its own proprietary platform or integrates among current technologies to create hybrid solutions. At the heart of this effort is the law firm's tech incubator, Fenwick Labs. With a staff of 10—eight of whom are application developers—the team is helping Fenwick push the bounds of legal innovation.

But while Fenwick Labs is unique to the firm, how it has evolved is part of a larger story. In fact, Fenwick Labs' experience is a microcosm of both the broader changes in the legal technology market over the past few years and the current trends defining its future.

Today's Fenwick Labs is not the same one that initially launched in 2008. When Mark Gerow, the firm's current director of application development and business process and leader of Fenwick Labs, started at Fenwick in 2005, he recalled that “cutting edge” technology meant client extranets.

A decade ago, Fenwick Labs focused on primarily developing these extranets. But these days, the lab's attention is elsewhere. “I would say the transition has been from creating and supporting platforms to present data to creating active process-based platforms that support our attorneys and our clients in the legal process,” Gerow said.

If that all sounds familiar, it should. Legal process and workflow improvement has been the core driver of recent legal technology development and adoption over the past few years. And there is a good reason why: The market is demanding it.

Many legal departments are facing stagnant or shrinking budgets and have looked to workflow and process automation tools as a way to elicit savings, as well as enable them to onboard more work themselves.

And while legal departments have tightened their spending, they are also demanding more out of their law firms, putting even more pressure on firms to streamline their operations as well. It's a symptom of a modern economy where companies are bigger, change is happening faster, and there is less time to deliberate before making a decision.

“The demands on our lawyers are incredible,” said Camille Reynolds, senior director of knowledge and innovation delivery at Fenwick.

“Our former chair liked to tell the story where 15, 20 years ago, you would get a phone call from a client and it would be a $1 million question and you'd have a week to answer it,” she said. “Now they get a call and it might be a $20 million question that might impact their business in a much bigger way and you have five minutes to answer it.”

To reach a new level of efficiency required by today's clients, Fenwick, like a host of other law firms, is turning to artificial intelligence (AI). In early 2017, the firm drew up plans to create an AI-powered knowledge management platform to give its attorneys quick access to the actionable information they needed to better serve clients.

The AI assistant platform, deemed “Fenni,” was launched firmwide in the third quarter of 2018. But it differs from other knowledge systems in one key way: It runs on the smart speaker platform Google Home, essentially allowing attorneys to ask and receive information via voice.

Gerow explained that Fenni, which pulls answers from a host of firm databases, including its financial, CRM and HR systems, “is getting used across the board [to ask about] everything from billing rates to client procedures to where can I find my paycheck.”

While using smart speaker-powered voice assistants for legal tech purposes is relatively novel, it is not entirely groundbreaking. Over the past two years, a growing amount of legal tech developers have been pushing the bounds of this new tech frontier.

Workflow automation provider ThinkSmart and knowledge management solution provider Onna, for example, integrated knowledge repository systems with smart speaker Amazon Echo in 2017. The same year also saw Thomson Reuters release an Amazon Echo application called The Workspace Assistant, which allows for time entry via voice. Startup Tell Tali also launched around the same time as a competing voice-powered time entry automation platform.

Most, if not all, of the first legal tech voice platforms integrated with Amazon Echo because it was the most advanced smart speaker on the market. But others, such as Google Home and Microsoft Cortana, have evolved to the point where they too are potential engines for the legal tech development, as evidenced by Fenwick's own development.

That Fenwick is one of the players pushing the bounds of legal tech should not entirely come as a surprise. While such innovation was once solely the purview of legal tech companies, a growing number of law firms have stepped off the sidelines to become full-fledged legal tech developers in recent years.

In April 2018, for example, Reed Smith launched its own subsidiary technology group, GravityStack, through which it creates and licenses technology products and offers managed services to clients. Other firms are developing technology internally to better meet their client needs, such as Perkins Coie and Robins Kaplan, which recently developed patent management platforms. What's more, firms such as Dentons and the U.K.-based TLT and Slaughter and May are investing directly in legal tech companies, aiming to steer their development and share in their success.

So while some firms can boast they were ahead of the curve, it's getting harder to say they are the only game in town. And there's good reason for that. Firms see their proprietary technology as a key differentiator, something that separates them from other firms and gives them a unique competitive edge.

“I do think there is a difference in firms who have the bench, who could build if they chose to do so versus firms who have no options but to go to the market and buy what everyone else has to buy,” Gerow said.

Legal tech, therefore, is becoming an integral part of law firm business. And now more than ever, law firms have a say in how it evolves.