August 2, 2024
As Torys finds creative ways to improve processes and increase effectiveness across the firm, members of our Knowledge and Innovation team sat down with the CBA’s National Magazine to unpack what goes into finding these efficiencies.
The key to innovation at Torys is collecting input from all levels and ensuring everyone has a say—from junior associates all the way up to senior partners and counsel, says Sukesh Kamra, Torys’ chief knowledge and innovation officer. This approach allows for practitioners across the firm to work collaboratively and “explore to then come to a solution to a pain point” together.
Many of the firm’s greatest innovations come from understanding pain points, Sukesh says. In fact, when he joined Torys, he worked to launch “an internal ‘listening tour’ to meet lawyers at all levels across all practices to uncover inefficiencies and issues,” the article points out. However, this wouldn’t have been possible without the input of junior associates and articling students who brought new ideas to the firm, says Clare Mauro, director of litigation and ediscovery services.
To nurture this culture of creativity and problem-solving, the firm’s knowledge and innovation team conducts focus groups with diverse firm members about every six weeks, explains Kayla Goldrich, director of practice management. “Sometimes we talk to them about a product, sometimes we pick their brain,” Kayla says. This not only helps the team to identify issues and potential solutions, but also ensures lawyers feel that they are involved in the brainstorming and development process and are “ready to champion our products,” she says.
The result of this collaboration is being recognized by the market. This year alone, Torys has won the 2024 IFLR Tech Innovation Award for our side letter management tool, a state-of-the-art information management solution that fundamentally alters how we manage and maintain legal information for our clients, the article points out. The tool was created by a cross-functional team of developers, designers, data scientists and lawyers. We also won Best Use of Technology in a Law Firm at the Canadian Law Awards for collaboration with the firm’s Competition Law practice group to create the first-ever advanced M&A geographic analysis product to help visualize different competitive market dynamics for particular regions in real time.
As AI technologies continue to advance across industries, Torys is working to better understand how these technologies can be adopted in an ethical and efficient way. An important part of this is education. “It's not the case that if you build it, they will come,” says Dustin Paterson, director of innovation. “You really have to promote it and show [lawyers], walk them through and train them and tell them 4,567 times that this is really valuable.”
Equally as important is taking meaningful and strategic approaches to process innovation, stresses senior associate Jessica Lumière, who is based in Torys’ Legal Services Centre in Halifax. “I think it's important that part of the options are answers that always contemplate the process, not just can we fix it with technology,” she says. “That workflow piece is incredibly important.”
LSC Managing Partner Chris Fowles adds that innovations don’t always need to be groundbreaking or complex to be effective. Even if a process innovation saves only five minutes, “if we’re doing 1,000 of these documents every year, we’re saving 160 hours,” he says.
Ultimately, Torys culture of innovation is supported by a test-and-learn mentality and the belief that failure is not always a bad thing. “We’re going to have the various paths—some that work, some that don’t work—to get to lessons learned,” Sukesh says. “It’s part of the pipeline creation because we won’t get to something working really well until we figure out what works and what doesn't.”
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