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.

When David Morley started at Allen & Overy (A&O) in 1980, there were 35 partners and just one office. Annual billings were around £8m. By the time he retired this April, after eight years as senior partner and a further five years as managing partner, the firm had 530 partners across its network of 44 offices in 31 countries. Its latest annual revenues were £1.28bn.

"I spent my whole career with one firm, so there must be something about it that worked for me, either that or a complete lack of imagination," says Morley. A natural restlessness drove him to innovate: "I never felt that whatever we were doing could ever be perfect. As a firm, we had quite a healthy culture. But no matter how well we did, we always questioned ourselves as to whether we could do it better. There was a constant search for a better way of doing things. That's been a driving motivation for me all through my life."

Among A&O's groundbreaking innovations was the decision in July 2011 to open a Belfast office, comprising the firm's legal services centre and support services centre. Morley was then senior partner and Wim Dejonghe managing partner. David credits Dejonghe with being the driving force behind the Belfast move and Peerpoint. "We worked very closely together and saw the world in much the same way. Two heads are often better than one when driving forward change."'

The inspiration, he suggests, was: "A recognition that we'd moved into a tougher, lower growth environment – we needed to search for ways in which we could run our operations more efficiently and more cost effectively. We decided to completely reimagine the way we were doing things in the back office and reconstruct it. We needed to move out of London, because it didn't make sense any longer to have all your back office situated in the heart of one of the most expensive cities in the world."

But the Belfast decision wasn't just about cost, he says. "It was also about improving our processes so we could streamline things. Over the years, all organisations, they're like boats that sit in the sea: they gather barnacles, they lose that racing edge – you need to wax and polish them, you need to look after them, you need to have another look at what you need to do to keep your speed up."

Immediately before the Belfast launch was due to go public, there was a crisis of confidence: "We'd spent over a year doing all the work – a huge effort. But the night before we were due to announce it, Wim came into my room and said: 'We're going to have to cancel this because there's just too much opposition, too many people telling us where we're going wrong and why it won't work.'

"We both knew there was absolutely no way we were not going to go ahead with it. But whenever you do anything new, particularly in the law, it unsettles and confounds people. This is part of the key to successful innovation: getting the balance right between listening to the sceptics, the naysayers and the doomsters – who sometimes can be right – but not being overwhelmed by them, and being able to make progress and move things forward even in the teeth of sometimes quite entrenched opposition."

Morley puts the innovation of Belfast into context: "A number of firms ended up doing similar things, but ours did catch the eye in the way that we did it, the scale that we did it, the speed that we did it and the way we executed it. That's a really important point that often gets lost. Many people think that innovation is about dreaming up wacky ideas or inventing the next iPad, but a lot of it is in the execution: being able to turn those ideas into something practical that works and that sticks." Slightly amended, he quotes an old army phrase: prior preparation prevents particularly poor performance.

Two other innovations championed by Morley (and Dejonghe) are worthy of note. The first is Peerpoint: A&O's global, flexible resourcing business. It provides the opportunity for experienced, top-tier lawyers to work as consultants on contract in high quality legal placements with A&O teams and for clients directly.

Wim came into my room and said: 'We're going to have to cancel this because there's just too much opposition, too many people telling us where we're going wrong and why it won't work'

"It started from realising that the market was changing: a shift in attitudes among clients and lawyers as to the ways in which people might work. The main driver was thinking about how could we make this boat go faster, how could we streamline our processes, how could we produce a better result for the client and for the firm in terms of how we manage our resources."

Again, there was scepticism: worries about quality control and how A&O would train its junior lawyers if it took off. "Lots of very valid concerns," says Morley. To address the quality issue, Peerpoint began with only A&O alumni. "That is often a good way of approaching innovation: to start in a manageable way that addresses the main criticisms and enables you to get the thing off the ground and demonstrate that the model works."

When the demand from clients became evident, "we started experimenting, putting people into clients and charging them", says Morley. "Once the model was proven, people recognised it and partners started using it, then we were able to persuade people that we could go beyond the A&O alumni and recruit other highly qualified people." Today, roughly half of Peerpoint's lawyers are A&O alumni.

Morley's second innovation has been as a founding member of PRIME, which emerged from Smart Start, the firm's initiative to give Year 12 students from non-privileged backgrounds the chance to spend a week at A&O offices and gain a real insight into the world of business.

Morley describes PRIME as "a nationwide initiative" – almost 100 law firms across the UK have joined since it was started. "Its goal," he explains, "is to provide quality work experience to young people from less privileged backgrounds. That is key because quality work experience is the new jobs currency."

"Those firms together have provided quality work experience to more than 3,000 young people who would almost certainly not otherwise have had that opportunity. A&O kicked it all off, but it is the collective effort of the firms that joined the scheme that has made the difference. Finding a format that enabled every firm to agree upon a common approach was the real innovation."

The motivation for both schemes was personal: "I went to a state school in Chester," says Morley. "I just couldn't believe, [as] somebody coming from an ordinary background, with parents earning average or below average wages, [that] it was actually getting harder to enter the profession than when I entered 35 years ago. That seemed to me to be bad for individuals, bad for society and bad for the profession as a whole. The profession definitely needs a diversity of talent; not just gender and all of those things, but also background."

He met many people who felt the same way, so: "It seemed to be a concrete, practical step that we could take. It doesn't answer every question nor solve every problem, but there's only so much you can do, and that you can ask the business to do, in helping with these social initiatives. This seemed like a very practical way where we could really help – by offering practical assistance to people who might otherwise not have had it and getting people into the profession who might otherwise not have done so."