Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner (BCLP) has formed its first combined innovation team since the transatlantic tie-up of Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) and US firm Bryan Cave six months ago.

The group is led by Katie DeBord, who was chief innovation officer at legacy Bryan Cave and has continued in the role at the merged firm, while her legacy Bryan Cave colleague Christian Zust, director of the US firm's client technology group, will head up the regional innovation solutions team responsible for the Americas.

Meanwhile, legacy BLP lawyer Nick Pryor has been appointed as regional innovation solutions director for the EMEA region, while former Bryan Cave European marketing director Keith Hardie has taken up the post of director of innovation marketing and business development.

DeBord said: "Before the merger, both firms were recognised as among the most innovative law firms in their markets. The merger has given us an opportunity to build on that track record to ensure we remain at the forefront of rethinking the way in which legal services are delivered."

The firm has also announced a newly created role for Chris Emerson, Bryan Cave's chief practice economics officer and co-leader of BCXponent, Bryan Cave's legal operations consulting group. He will become COO for the combined firm's legal operations consultancy group, which DeBord will also co-head.

The group is aimed at helping in-house legal teams improve their business processes and use technology more effectively, and is a combination of Bryan Cave's BCXponent business and BLP's 'Streamline' legal process improvement service.

BLP strategic client technology head Bruce Braude will play a lead role for this new group within the EMEA markets while Carrie Marks, who was director of practice economics at Bryan Cave, will lead the firm's existing process improvement and project management teams globally.

Emerson said: "The success of our BCXponent and Streamline services demonstrates that in-house legal teams are not only looking for law firms to find new ways of delivering their services, but they are also struggling with how to apply to their own work the huge range of new technologies and approaches that now available. We work with companies of all sizes, from the Fortune 50 down to the newest startups. Given our experience globally and the fact that we have developed our own proprietary workflow system for in-house teams, we want to enable clients to access the support they need."

Earlier this year, BCLP underlined its innovative credentials by taking home the AI Innovation Award at the Legal Week Innovation Awards 2018. The firm was recognised for BLP's pre-merger High Court success in a case involving the use of predictive coding technology.

Many other firms are looking to bring together their innovation efforts under one roof, and CMS recently launched a team responsible for joining up and advancing the firm's legal services and technology offerings, as part of a push to consolidate the ambitions of the three legacy firms that merged last year.

That team, dubbed 'CMS by Design', is led by CMS executive partner Paul Stevens and includes head of legal service design and delivery John Craske, head of tech innovation Jane Challoner, IT head Razvan Cretu, head of digital and data Elle Todd and client management head Jo Witham.