Rob Booth, general counsel and company secretary at the Crown Estate, is chairing LegalWeek CONNECT today (28 November), alongside Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner co-chair Lisa Mayhew.

Day one of LegalWeek CONNECT is focusing on collaboration, from the perspective of law firms, their clients and other legal service providers. What are you expecting to touch on?

One of the things I want to talk about is getting people beyond talking about collaboration and into actually doing it. On one side we've got law firms wanting to sell collaboration, and on the other side we have clients wanting to buy it, but not enough people are playing in the middle.

What we also want to major on is that the tone of collaboration should itself be collaborative. I go to too many events about collaboration and it turns into GCs blaming law firms for not collaborating, and law firms firing back criticisms saying the GCs don't build the bridges that enable it to happen. Some of those criticisms are undoubtedly based in fact, but we need to get beyond that and focus on how we can help each other to collaborate.

What does the term collaboration mean to you personally?

It's quite a zeitgeisty sort of word but if you look at what it means, it's extremely powerful. For me, collaboration is more than just agreeing – it's not about an 'ask' and a 'give', it's about an interaction that brings challenge on both sides and which creates a special outcome.

It may sound odd – but I think of it as 1+1=3. If you have an individual with a good idea, that's a 1. If you have two people simply agreeing on that idea or having the same good idea – that's still a 1. If two people apply their two ideas separately, that could be a 2, but they may interfere with each other. However, if you put two diverse thinkers together and have them collaborate, using their different ideas and utilising their different strengths, they can create a single solution that isn't a 1, is better than two separate ideas, and makes a holistic 3. It's fundamentally better; it's greater than the sum of its parts.

These performance benefits are measurable; science tells us that one smart person is significantly worse at problem-solving than a few less smart but diverse people collaborating.

Collaboration is not cooperation, and it's not accommodation. Collaboration is a genuinely different product. In that, there's an inherent challenge that we as humans find hard: we don't like it when people disagree with us. But the fact is that we run better projects when there's that element of challenge. Collaboration is active rather than passive, and I think it needs to be purpose-driven to really work.

Technology is a key focus for the workshops on day one – is this a particular area where there are opportunities for collaboration? Should law firms and their clients be working together to develop new tech solutions?

In the legal space, it's frankly not quite there yet. I'm doing an MBA at the moment and watching how people outside of my usual environment communicate with each other is phenomenal. I'm seeing people use Zoom, Trello, Slack, Teams, Skype, BlueJeans, Blackboard, WhatsApp and many more channels, often at the same time. There's a lot of 'virtual team' technology that is getting closer and closer to replicating a physical team – albeit I am still a fan of the real thing to fully unlock the potential of a group.

Technology needs to be a means to an end in collaboration, but I think law firms are a long way away from this still. There's a whole realignment that needs to come into play.

I believe that this technology will be a key building block of the bionic lawyer. That's a project we have been engaging on with our panel firms, to build a blueprint for the future legal professional and the tools and organisational structures that will help create them.

How important is the culture of a business when it comes to encouraging collaboration? And can in-house lawyers play a role in driving this?

It's really, really important. It definitely takes alignment between organisations to really work and it is important for the client to be open to collaboration, as well as the firm. The role that in-house lawyers play over and above this is that they control a number of levers that enable collaboration to happen. They can determine lines of communication, reward structures, opportunities for knowledge transfer and points of integration – all of which impact collaboration.

In-house teams need to use this to build the bridges that allow broad investment in relationships with law firms, which in turn allows collaboration to flourish. You can't magic up culture, but if you pull the right levers you can definitely have a positive influence on it and can then case study the results.

What is the Crown Estate doing to encourage collaboration, both internally and with its external law firms?

Firstly, we have built an architecture with our firms and we commit to it. We create promises that we deliver on and focus on providing clarity and transparency in all that we do with our panel. This allows us to generate a confidence in our external legal team, which we think is an important building block for collaboration across the panel. Some of that clarity and transparency is structural – with purpose-driven quarterly sessions for each firm – and some of it is cultural, in how the team here operates in-role. It takes a lot of work, but it is a great investment for us.

Secondly, we have tried to identify opportunities for our external ecosystem of very smart people to collectively apply their intellect, without straying into areas that we know will be sensitive. Asking people to give up their valuable IP with no apparent benefit is too punchy for us; but there are plenty of business problems that our panel can solve creatively, with a little curation and without straying into that territory.

What are the kind of roadblocks you've faced when trying to encourage better collaboration?

One is that it can be quite difficult to really assess how collaborative an external firm is going to be with you when you first start using them. Firms market themselves well in this space, but that means you can quite often get it wrong when the substance doesn't match the hype. Investing time and thought in your tendering and asking smart questions is a mitigation; but nobody gets it right every time.

There is also a sense of nervousness in the market over what collaboration really means and what teams need in order to achieve it – together with some cynicism about it just being a bit of corporate-speak. As an industry, I think we need a common understanding of what collaboration means, because that allows us to unlock it together.

At the same time, I talk to a lot of GCs who are under tremendous pressure to deliver more for less – which can push them away from having the time to invest in collaborative activity. I think the irony in that might be that time invested in that collaboration could hold the key to delivering the more-for-less that is asked for.

What about LegalWeek CONNECT are you looking forward to?

I think events like this are fundamental, in that they are moments in time where a super-smart group of people can get out of their day-to-day routine and see what they can do to improve the way they work. I think there is power in our thinking more as an industry, and less as individuals.

I'm genuinely excited about LegalWeek CONNECT – and the STEPS approach that we will be talking about is a really neat way of thinking about it all and demystifying some of the hype.