Following the financial crisis, in-house attorneys in commercial banking had to wear two hats: one of their particular specialty and another that let executives know they could navigate through regulations.

“Commercial banking is highly regulated. It always has been and always will be,” says James Chosy, U.S. Bank's executive vice president and general counsel.

Now these same attorneys must put let their employers know they can put on an innovation cap to support the bank's new products.

Chosy says the amount of new products and innovation in commercial banking has skyrocketed over the past two years.

“Some of our senior executives who have been around for a while have seen some change over the years,” he says, “but they say they've seen more change in the past two years than they have in their 35 to 40 years [in the industry] combined.”

As U.S. Bank began to launch new products, including Simple Loan, a way for customers to apply for and get loans quickly, the law division realized it needed to educate itself to help the bank's initiatives. In 2018, Chosy helped to set up The Innovation Academy and brought in experts in different subject areas to accelerate its own learning and its own knowledge base around the change that was happening.

“Part of it was a self-education and awareness effort and another part of it was to have all of the members of our department to become much more conversant in what was happening in the world of innovation and technology,” Chosy says.

Since the inception of the innovation academy, the law division at U.S. Bank has had experts from Verizon, Uber and Microsoft come in and give presentations on topics such as blockchain and artificial intelligence, virtual and ­augmented reality and financial services in the new gig economy. The Innovation Academy has become so successful that other divisions in the bank have asked to be a part of the academy. Chosy says the law division has hosted six classes in 2018 and plans on continuing the academy throughout 2019.

The next step the law division took was to create a Center for Technology and Digital Initiatives. The goal of the center was to combine groups within the legal department that would be able to fit under the “broader umbrella” of innovation. The groups combined were digital, cybersecurity, payments, privacy and intellectual property.

“The idea was to drive focus on those areas to ensure we're delivering top quality legal service in those spaces but to also drive that much more focus, promote consistency in our approach and then ultimately in our legal advice in those areas,” Chosy says.

Historically, the different product lines were siloed from each other. That isolation between product lines led to different technologies being used. For example, when the law division realized that there were three different service providers being used for cloud storage, they found a way to condense them to one.

“As technology begins to bleed across, we wanted to make sure that business lines were doing and the lawyers who support [the business lines] were looking at that [technology] on a broader basis,” says Chris Lenhart, senior vice president and deputy general counsel.

Mary Baker, executive vice president and director of legal operations at the bank, says the operations function at the bank has a hand in helping to consolidate these technologies. “Our team is supporting all of these efforts. It starts at the top with the tech group. We have some of our own ­homegrown systems that need to work just within the law division, we do tap into and work with the bank's operations and technology tools in order to better support the business lines,” Baker says.

Because of the consolidations, the different product lines are looking at how they contract with certain providers as an enterprise-wide issue, Chosy says.

Baker says legal operations touch all of the efforts, including outside counsel use and management. The collaborative effort to foster innovation does not end internally for the legal department.

In the fall of 2018, the law division at Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank held its first preferred panel conference, where Chosy says innovation was among the most concentrated on topics.

The approximately 40 panels that make up the lion's share of the law ­division's outside counsel spend convened, and attorneys from firms such as Faegre Baker Daniels, Davis Wright Tremaine, and Greenberg Traurig ­discussed what they're doing to help clients with innovation and technology.

“They talked about how they're innovating and client service work,” Chosy explains.

An outgrowth of that conference, Chosy says, was that Faegre Baker Daniels invited Baker and a few others in the law division to take part in its design lab at Stanford University.

“They set up design labs for clients, like us, and set up what they call 'design sprints' where you can come in and through their design lab, a lot of which has to do with visual advocacy, and problem-solve in real time,” Chosy says.

Baker added that the visual advocacy portion was a major component of the sprint. “That is where things are moving in the industry,” Baker says. “That is something we're working on when it comes to thinking differently and innovation.”

“[We're] moving away from the law firm memos of old and really communicating information in the way that clients want it and need it,” Chosy says.

When thinking about ways to support business goals, ethics, especially for subjects such as data privacy, must be top of mind, Chosy says.

“Banks, if nothing else, are giant repositories for data,” Chosy says. “There may be a lot that you can do with data that is perfectly legal, but the question is what should you do with data?” In order to streamline the ethical questions, for the past two years the ethics group at U.S. Bank has been overseen by the general counsel.

Another area the bank's law division is innovating is diversity and inclusion. Diversity Lab recently created an in-house Mansfield Rule certification program, of which the law division is an early adopter. Chosy says that Diversity Lab will be launching a one-year pilot in July and after that year he hopes the law division will be Mansfield certified.

“In the law division, we're very much a human capital function. We don't have products; we just have very smart and capable people who are dispensing their best judgment and legal advice,” Chosy says. “To do that optimally, we have to draw from diverse pools and diverse talent. Fundamentally I think inclusion drives innovation.”