Last week, lawyers at Allen & Overy's New York office were tasked with bringing some creativity to legal services. But they weren't doing it alone. As part of the firm's 'US Legal Tech Week', its New York-based lawyers and clients got the chance to interact and collaborate with four startups from the firm's Fuse incubator.

This wasn't the first time these A&O lawyers had come into contact with Fuse. Shruti Ajitsaria, head of Fuse and counsel at A&O, said the firm regularly hosts videoconferencing sessions between its worldwide offices and the incubator in its London headquarters.

The US Legal Tech Week, however, was the first opportunity the firm's lawyers in New York have had to interact with Fuse startups in person. "What we haven't been able to do up until now is bring [Fuse] members to New York and develop a relationship of trust and a one-to-one relationship," Ajitsaria said.

Fuse, which launched in 2017 and supports a rotating mix of eight startups, is different from other incubators in the legal market in that it focuses solely on fostering legal tech innovation and forgoes equity investment.

Instead, A&O offers each startup in its incubator office space and direct access to the firm's lawyers and clients for advice and support. In return, the firm gets early access to each startup's technology and, importantly, a chance to work together on ideas around improving legal services.

For the firm's New York lawyers and clients, this was the week to capitalise on those benefits. "We organised [Legal Tech Week] in a very structured way," said David Lucking, a partner and head of the firm's US-based international capital markets group.

During the week, A&O's New York office hosted about 100 client meetings about Fuse, a client networking event, a partner-level meeting to discuss legal tech ideas, and five days of "open sessions" where anyone at the office could meet with Fuse startups one on one and sample the technology, he added.

The four Fuse startups participating in US Legal Tech Week included Avvoka, a contract drafting, workflow and analytics platform; Regnosys, a regtech company that aims to help the financial industry with regulatory compliance; Signal Media, an artificial intelligence-powered intelligence firm; and Nivaura, a platform that uses blockchain technology to automate the issuance and administration of financial instruments.

Nivaura is the only startup A&O has invested in, a choice that Ajitsaria said "makes sense from a strategic perspective", given the startup and A&O's historical focus on bond issuance work. Most other Fuse startups have received funding from a variety of venture capital and other investors.

Ajitsaria added that some of the startups, such as the ones impacting the financial industry, were chosen for Legal Tech Week to spur New York-based clients' interest in what Fuse is doing, while others were chosen to help the office's lawyers think about new ways of working internally.

In addition to New York, the firm is also bringing these four startups to its Washington DC offices today (14 January) for a one-day event. A&O also held a similar Legal Tech Week recently in Singapore last November, which was attended by local government representatives.

Given that Fuse only works with its startups for a limited time, which is officially set at six months but usually extends beyond that depending on the engagement, the technologies A&O lawyers come into contact with can constantly evolve.

Yet since the firm doesn't invest in most of its startups, there is always a risk a Fuse startup will forgo developing technology specifically for the legal market. Last July, for instance, one of Fuse's previous startups, Bloomsbury AI, a natural language processing company, was acquired by Facebook to help in its efforts to combat "fake news" on the social media platform.

Ajitsaria, however, noted that Bloomsbury AI wasn't solely focused on legal tech, adding that Fuse's aim is to include tech companies from outside the traditional legal market. "I think Bloomsbury AI was a good lesson for us because it is about pushing the boundaries, and it wasn't about using the same legal tech vendors that everyone is looking at and licensing from."

Still, she noted that many of the startups currently in Fuse were founded by former lawyers and are primarily focused on the legal market.

Ajitsaria, who is an angel investor herself, also explained Fuse's decision not to take equity in most of its startups by noting that other law firms may be hesitant to use technology that is partially owned by a competitor.

She believes that law firm investment in AI contract review platform Luminance, for example, "really hampered them", adding: "I haven't seen them get the same traction as RAVN and Kira. Other law firms don't want to use technology that is in part held by another law firm."