Mike Rebeiro, global head of technology and innovation, Norton Rose Fulbright Mike Rebeiro, global head of technology and innovation, Norton Rose Fulbright

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As global head of technology and innovation at Norton Rose Fulbright, Mike Rebeiro advises on large-scale IT and business process outsourcing, including cross-border transactions, IT procurement, data privacy and digital projects for both the public and private sectors. Innovation is therefore in his DNA.

Rebeiro offers a considered view on how innovation is best applied: "Law firms have been good at innovation but they haven't necessarily connected innovation to technology-enabled innovation. There are two different things. The legal profession generally has focused its innovation on doing what it does better, but it hasn't focused its efforts on what I would call disruptive innovation.

"That is the challenge for law firms now because in terms of disruptive innovation, we are in a place where business model disruption is happening all around us. It's affecting every industry that we work for and it is going to affect the legal services market. That business model disruption means that we are susceptible to disruption from non-traditional legal players."

He defines the latter as those who "really invest heavily in technology and actually understand how that they can use technology, big data analytics and AI to disrupt what we do".

Rebeiro believes: "Innovation happens when you have intelligent people working collaboratively together rather than on their own – we're trying to get people to do that." Part of the problem with law firms, he suggests, is: "They expect that if they're going to invest in a project, they expect that project to work first time, but innovation isn't always successful. Lawyers need to recognise that if we invest in innovation, nine times out of 10, it won't be a success. But the one time out of 10 that it will be a success may be a game changer. That's a different mindset."

Norton Rose is trying to inculcate innovation and encourage innovative thinking through every layer of the firm but especially in the next generation of younger lawyers, believing that is where innovation can really thrive.

"The problem," says Rebeiro, "is that lawyers tend to be very conservative in their approach to life. The things that we can learn from those who are at the cutting edge is the willingness to fail, to have that entrepreneurial spirit and that startup feeling. Not many lawyers working in private practice have ever worked in a startup, and we need to get that startup culture into our approach to innovation." Part of this lies in increasing their risk appetite, "but not taking risk for the sake of taking risk", he adds.

Rebeiro identifies technology as a process: law firms gradually moving into investment in back-office technology, then into the middle and front offices.

"But we're still way off from the front office: looking at technology replacing the role of some of the things that we do now," he says, pointing to "an element of tasks that we regard as high value at the moment, which will over time become more commoditised and, as that happens, they become susceptible to technology implementation and technology change."

Law firms are notoriously late adopters because "they are reticent to invest in technology", argues Rebeiro. "So the profession invests in the back-office infrastructure stuff. But that's not exciting technology; it's not transformative technology." While Norton Rose is also investing heavily in its back-office technology, the firm's current priority is investing in the front office.

If you don't have a digital strategy, I don't think you're going to be around in five years' time

Although he identifies due diligence process and contract drafting as being particularly susceptible to imminent AI applications, Rebeiro sees AI as nascent technology: "It's a bit like the driverless car: you won't go from having a fully piloted or driven car to a driverless car overnight, but you'll get to the tipping point where there will be more fully driverless cars on the road by a certain date than there will be driving cars. That will happen with AI as well.

"We're already seeing some AI applications in use. But it will become far more interesting when you combine AI with big data and predictive analytics, because we'll be able to use big data and AI to have a much more sophisticated approach to risk."

In the medium term, Rebeiro suggests that big data analytics will be critical. "If you think of a law firm, the amount of data they own, that's where the value is, that's where the diamonds in the rough can be found," he says. "Being able to use big data analytics to analyse risk appetite and to see how the risk appetite landscape is changing; being able to identify what really is important to negotiate and what isn't important to negotiate. That's where the real value comes. It's where the investment dollars should go."

Digital strategy is another key priority for Norton Rose Fulbright: "If you don't have a digital strategy, I don't think you're going to be around in five years' time," says Rebeiro. "You need to look at digital holistically within the business: anything from the back office through to social media, the AI app, search engine, data streaming, data acquisition. Perhaps a better way of putting it is having a data strategy as well as a digital strategy."

In finding out about what other law firms are doing, Rebeiro is disinterested: "I'm much more interested in what other business sectors are doing: as a profession we have much more to learn from other industry sectors than we do from looking at each other," he says. "We are, as an industry, analogue – and the world is digital."

In terms of business model disruption, he points to what is happening in automobile automation, the internet of things, big data predictive analytics and the operation of Uber and Airbnb: "We have much more to learn from the sharing economy than we do by looking at what other professional services firms are doing," he says.

When it comes to encouraging innovation within NRF, Rebeiro argues for incentivising innovation. "Traditionally, lawyers are incentivised by how many hours they bill – that model has to go. You have to incentivise people far more by their contribution to the business; and innovation needs to be seen as part of a key contribution to the business."