CMS has launched a new team responsible for joining up and advancing the firm's legal services and technology offerings, in a drive to consolidate the ambitions of the three legacy firms that merged last year.

The team, called CMS by design, is led by CMS executive partner Paul Stevens, and also consists of the firm's 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. They will report on progress to both senior partner Penelope Warne and managing partner Stephen Millar.

The group will help shape delivery of CMS's legal services and technology, as well as its four client services. These include Instinctive Understanding, its initiative for in-house lawyers; digital upskilling service Digital Academy; legal tech hub Developers on Demand; and Mix, which provides bespoke tech services to clients.

"Part of the rationale behind the merger was to invest time, energy and resource to develop better ways of serving clients through tech, processes and new approaches," said CMS executive partner, Paul Stevens, who was one of the architects behind the merger. "It's holistic, and aimed to embrace all elements of the client's needs."

The team will sit inside the firm's wider global tech and innovation group and work alongside an advisory team made up of lawyers from CMS's key sector groups, as well as business service specialists, external advisers and clients.

Stevens highlighted some of the projects that the legacy firms had embarked on, including Olswang's startup incubator equIP, and CMS Cameron McKenna's agile systems of working and use of Surface Pros.

"Since the merger, we've managed to leverage more resource into these initatives, and have grown equIP into a 65-business-strong programme," Stevens added. "It's doing well and we're rolling it out internationally.

"The three [legacy] firms had new technologies, which together could deliver more bang for your buck," he added. "On the merger, the idea was to be a future-facing firm. Now having gone through it, there will always be hiccups, but there were an awful lot of good things – this is the fruition of that."