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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.

Click here to download the report from Legal Week Law (free registration required).

"Lawyers are not great at things going wrong or in dealing with uncertainty. Innovation requires an ability to deal with both," says Simon Harper, co-founder of Lawyers On Demand (LOD).

Started in 2007, LOD was Harper's brainchild (together with Jonathan Brenner) after eight years as a partner leading the technology and media team at Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP). Ever since, LOD has been at the forefront of alternative legal service providers, creating a new category of business.

In 2012, Harper stepped down from the BLP partnership to spin out LOD and lead the business full time. Since the spinoff, lawyer headcount has trebled. Today, it has around 650 freelance lawyers working with clients operating in the UK and – via its recent merger with AdventBalance – in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.

At the outset, Harper points to a combination of three things happening simultaneously as catalysts. First, he highlights: "An awareness that our large corporate clients were looking for a different way of doing some of their work, their business as usual work, which just didn't make sense for them at £300-£500 per hour."

The second piece was "more of a hunch", he says. "People who didn't want the traditional route, had got a fantastic CV but just wanted to work differently. It was something bigger than work-life balance, a shift in attitude about what people really wanted from their working life. The hunch was: this wasn't just a small group of individuals but a wider group that would be happy to work that way."

The third element centred on how people work, the role of technology, globalisation and the shifting expectations of the employer-employee relationship. "Perhaps an openmindedness to how people work, fuelled by different technology," says Harper.

In combining three pieces of the puzzle, "the glue", he adds, came with LOD creating "a different sort of legal service". LOD was in gestation for a year, launching before the crisis of 2008-09. "The latent need in the market was then accelerated," says Harper, who had to persuade others to back him: "Lawyers can do risk but there is an unwillingness to deal with uncertainty."

He explains that there are two sides to the LOD equation that make it work. "There is the client side and the lawyer side – because with that offering, the lawyers who work with LOD have as much power as the clients do: they can choose where they work, when they work, how they work and who they want to work with."

Harper wanted to "banish the false perception of lawyers who choose to work on a project or interim basis as being second rate". But arguably his greatest challenge came from starting LOD within an existing law firm, although he points to "a hugely helpful approach from BLP". Leveraging the BLP brand was "useful", but he found that LOD very quickly "built up trust".

In the way that someone might use Airbnb, we felt people increasingly wanted to find out more information about the sorts of lawyers they could work with in a flexible way.

In presenting the LOD brand, he worked hard to differentiate. He says: "Even how the website or material looked, we always used the mantra: what wouldn't a law firm do?" The key issue in brand differentiation, he explains, was to retain the quality. "That was about the lawyers we hired and the people we hired to run the business – to make sure that whatever we did was shot through with quality."

As LOD's success became clear, imitators emerged: "A really useful reminder that innovation isn't static," he says. "In a changing market you've got to keep moving. We've got to keep making sure that what we offer lawyers is the best available, the most relevant and that we're providing what they want."

After the 2012 spinoff, LOD started an "on-call service", slightly closer to what law firms provide, so more of a challenge to the traditional law firm model where clients can use the LOD lawyers flexibly on projects. LOD now works with more than 20 law firms, most recently DLA Piper.

This year has seen further innovation at LOD. Internationally, the Australian merger in March with AdventBalance was followed by the launch of Spoke in July. An online marketplace for legal services, Spoke allows businesses or law firms seeking short-term extra help to hire lawyers with spare capacity.

"In the way that someone might use Airbnb," says Harper, "we felt people increasingly wanted to find out more information about the sorts of lawyers they could work with in a flexible way – that is what Spoke is about. There is a wider group of lawyers that want to work in this way. For example, there are quite a few barristers on there."

Being an innovator often means being a disruptor. "It's something we enjoy doing as an organisation and something I enjoy doing to make things work," says Harper. "I think it's important to be enjoying it and feeling like it's making a bit of a difference and also to feel that there's some fun in it too." Although he acknowledges that big law firms have also innovated, he adds: "Notably, none of them have created their captive, LOD-like businesses as separate entities. None of them spun them out – they sit as captives within the traditional firm."

Harper reflects on how far LOD has come in a decade. "One of the really useful elements of having built a business like LOD is its agile size and structure," he says. "What strikes me about its management structure is that we can react fairly nimbly to market changes as we see them. We don't have a partnership that we need to bring along."

An avid fan of technology, who loves innovation, he reads widely on the subject: "I am completely with AI and anyone who ignores it does so at their peril, but it's not as if the machines will take over."