Innovation@Dechert

We must embrace experimentation, and with experimentation comes great successes and noble failures. To nurture an environment where innovation can thrive is to practice boldness, knowing at times we will fail and then learn and keep going."

Innovation in a law firm is as good as its capacity to capture ideas from across the organization and translate the great ones into practice. Our clients and people know that at Dechert we walk the talk when it comes to innovation. In 2022, we launched the Dechert Idea Bank, an open platform where people submit their ideas and track their progress after that. In 2023, we doubled down with Dechert’s I-Lab, an initiative aimed at turning into reality ideas that are considered of strategic importance and that, due to the fast pace of change these days, require specially dedicated resources for prompt execution”.

Our Innovation Incubator allows us to fund projects worthy of long-term investment with billable hours credit and financial resources. These are investments that our firm makes because of the long-term beneficial impact on our clients and our organization. In the past years, attorneys at Dechert have spent 1,000s of hours on over 30 different Incubator projects.

At Dechert we believe innovation should translate into creative ways to address challenges that are radically different from how we’re traditionally trained as lawyers. This is why we invest significantly in training our people on design thinking methodologies that then can be applied to real-life scenarios. We do this through hands-on, immersive in-person innovation workshops, where our Practice Groups get together to discuss strategic topics concerning their teams and clients, brainstorm and produce innovative ideas that are key to keeping our firm ahead of the game.”

Clients need advisors to be efficient without risking a loss in quality, so we have onboarded a variety of technology tools to augment and double-check our work. We are currently using AI to scan documents, tools to compare dozens of documents at the same time, and automations to generate documents. The tools generate millions of dollars in value for clients – either in time saved or as risks avoided.