Linklaters teams up with automation platform

Linklaters teams up with automation platform

Practice innovation will be managed by a new head of partnership Greg Baker

As part of its efforts to introduce new legaltech products, Linklaters has announced an ongoing partnership with automation platform BRYTER.

A newly appointed head of practice innovation, Greg Baker, is overseeing the firm's relationship with the Berlin-based company.

As a result, Linklaters' antitrust and foreign investment group (AFIG) and practice innovation lawyers have created a dawn raid app, an application that provides support to clients during unannounced inspections by antitrust authorities. Users can customize the app to fit different crisis scenarios and it covers 11 countries, the company said.

"Our drive to identify areas in our organization where innovation and disruption are likely to occur enables BRYTER's powerful and adaptable platform to rapidly prototype, test and identify the most appropriate development pathway for solutions designed to make our clients and lawyers' lives easier," Baker said.

BRYTER's no-code application solutions were developed in 2018 by former lawyer Michael Grupp to empower law firms and legal departments to build, manage and sell interactive applications without having to possess programming skills.

According to Crunchbase, it has received a total of $89 million in funding and has offices in New York, London, Frankfurt and Berlin. Ashurst, Deloitte, Telefónica, ING, McDonalds and Baker McKenzie are some of the clients.

Linklaters AFIG counsel Emma Cochrane commented on dawn raids: "Antitrust authorities must be responsive in a rapid and coordinated fashion to unannounced inspections or dawn raids." The AFIG website is easy to use and is designed to help clients understand how they do things in the event of a dawn raid and when to contact our AFIG lawyers, wherever they are in the world."

Recently, Linklaters transitioned its proprietary contract lifecycle management platform, CreateiQ, to the forefront of its innovation effort, at the expense of its own in-house technology start up, Nakhoda. Following the departure of former CEO Partha Mudgil in February 2020, Shilpa Bhandarkar, who was named CEO of Nakhoda, became CEO of CreateiQ, which was developed by the Nakhoda team.

Technology companies and law firms are increasingly working together to develop new products. A new IP management software system has been developed by Baker McKenzie by partnering with intellectual property management company MaxVal for the firm's brand management clients. Also, Spark Beyond, a company that specializes in artificial intelligence, works with the company.