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Innovation. With purpose.

At Browne Jacobson, innovation plays a crucial role in shaping solutions and strategies that anticipate industry challenges and drive progress. We focus on three key areas: client-focused solutions, proactive initiatives and developing technology.

Client-focused solutions: We start by listening. Problem-first. Then we combine our legal and commercial expertise with the relevant technology, data, project management and other professional skills to offer fresh insights and new ways to solve our clients’ challenges. We connect clients with our other clients and contacts. Together, we develop practical solutions to solve our clients’ challenges, with measurable results. Read more

Innovation in practice: We have developed a range of award-winning initiatives, including DEI programmes, leadership development, fixed fee-retainers and start-up support. Read more

Developing technology: We are constantly developing technology to improve efficiency and prepare our people for the future. We share these learnings with our clients, helping them to drive their own success. Read more

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Client-focused solutions

We use our deep understanding of each client’s business and sector to determine solutions for the specific challenge, driving efficiencies and helping to save them time and money. We identify where even the smallest of improvements can be made to make their life easier.

We bring together clients, contacts, and our diverse range of internal teams to foster knowledge-sharing and collective problem-solving. Our clients particularly value having access to our non-legal experts, especially when they lack similar resources within their own organisations. Our diverse international client base tells us this approach, coupled with our unique vantage point of working extensively with both the private and public sectors, makes us different from other firms.

Questions from our clients

The problems our clients face vary, and we use our deep understanding of their business and sector to determine solutions for the specific challenge, driving efficiencies and helping save our clients time and money.

Technology adoption

We have integrated AI into our daily operations, which increases our efficiency and saves clients time and money. We share our learning on these projects with clients and facilitate collaboration between them and our professional teams who lead on this internal innovation, including IT and Project Management. They talk through the latest advancements, summarise initiatives we are running internally and share our process for measuring success.  

For example, we have run sessions for clients about how we developed Jac, our internal secure generative AI chatbot, which improves efficiency. This has significantly less risk and cost than using Chat GPT, and other legal AI. We talk through our learnings, which includes a discussion of the technology, project management around developing the tool, and the impact on people. 

In partnership with the Machine Learning in Science Team from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham, we developed an inspiring training programme for lawyers to understand the essentials of AI. We invited clients to join us, creating a collaborative and dynamic learning experience where we discovered together how AI works, so that we can better leverage AI’s benefits while managing its risks responsibility and ethically.

We also talk our clients through how we are using AI to support internal correspondence, conduct research and process large amounts of non-legal information quickly. This includes workshops about our Legal Project management process, putting information in about cases and providing a workflow with timelines.  

These discussions have helped clients identify opportunities within their own teams and allowed them to plan for proof of concepts.

Our multidisciplinary team of AI legal experts support clients with the complex legal landscape surrounding AI. Governments are creating regulations to guarantee AI's secure and ethical development, and we support clients who work internationally to benchmark different approaches for AI authorisation. We work extensively with clients at the forefront of change across the private and public sectors and therefore bring a comprehensive perspective. 

Clients benefit from our investment in AI and machine learning. It complements our lawyers’ expertise by enabling us to provide faster, more efficient, and cost-effective advice.  

We use AI platforms like Avail to deliver more efficient land registry due diligence and Clarilis for document automation. These tools often enable more junior members of the team to deliver work, which reduces costs for clients. 

We also developed and deployed our own generative AI chatbot, named Jac, and invested in Microsoft Copilot to improve efficiency in day-to-day operations. By integrating our own data with artificial intelligence, and investing in products that include trusted external data sources, we will continue to evolve the services we deliver.  

The fast-changing landscape of emerging technology means we continuously evaluate new opportunities and deliver continuous improvement to our legal services.

Legal process innovation

Yes, we provide fixed-fee toolkits for many of our services. Our Instant In-house product is a bespoke retainer service that provides clients with instant access to a team of our lawyers for a fixed monthly fee.

Our team will get up to speed with the needs of your business quickly so that you feel like they are part of your in-house team.

The product also provides certainty over your monthly legal spend, as you would have with your own in-house team, while offering a greater breadth of expertise, more flexibility and less of the admin typically involved when instructing lawyers.

Fixed-fee toolkits are a particularly popular offering by our education team, whose schools, academy and university clients find great value in predictable spend and time savings.

We have developed our toolkits at price points relevant to the complexity of work, delivery timeframe and required resources.

Grow is our legal support programme exclusively for startups. It’s carefully tailored for companies at any stage of the startup journey from protecting an idea through to a successful exit.

Sustainable practices and social responsibility

Yes, as a firm we care deeply about being fair and inclusive, and have been partnering with our clients on projects to improve accessibility and inclusivity in communication.

Readability of insurance policies

Plain Numbers practitioner

We have developed two multi award-winning talent development programmes, and are very happy to share key learnings with our clients.

Our FAIRE (Fairer Access Into Real Experience) and REACH (Race, Equality and Cultural Heritage) talent development programmes aim to increase the number of people from lower socio-economic backgrounds and Black lawyers respectively. They provide both in-person and virtual work experience opportunities for people from lower socio-economic and minority backgrounds, who are under-represented in the legal profession. 

FAIRE

Since 2001, more than 37,500 students from over 2,000 UK wide schools, academies, and universities have taken part in FAIRE. We have also collaborated with a number of clients from both Public and Private sectors each of which have welcomed FAIRE programme students into their in-house teams as part of their paid in-person work placement.

REACH

In 2024, we launched our REACH (Race, Equality and Cultural Heritage) mentoring programme following a highly successful two-year pilot. REACH mentoring is an initiative designed to specifically address the disproportionate under-representation of Black lawyers working in UK law firms, which stands at just 3%, by growing, nurturing and ultimately hiring a sustainable pipeline of Black legal talent.

The six-month programme pairs students, aged 18 and over, with a mentor from Browne Jacobson or one of our clients in-house team members. Mentors share their skills, knowledge and insights to help the students gain an understanding of what it is like to work in the legal profession and to help improve their career prospects.

These initiatives have led to recognition such as being ranked the joint UK leading employer in The Social Mobility Foundation’s Employer Index, the leading authority on social mobility workplace best practice in the UK, and winning the Innovative Approach to Diversity, Equality and Inclusion category at the 2024 Inclusivity Excellence Awards, run by the Employers Network for Equality and Inclusion (enei).

We have also worked with clients on several external DEI initiatives, including:

  • Client-supported outreach delivery, with 16 lower socio-economic background students completing work experience at major companies including Volvo, Deliveroo, Mace, Welsh Government and BUPA.
  • Sharing socio-economic inclusion best practice with over 80 externals organisations through our innovative 2025 ‘client incubator’ series.
  • Bespoke consulting on how to increasing socio-economic diversity within the workforces, leading to revolutionary changes in recruitment, onboarding and promotion processes at multiple organisations.

We have provided a road map for others in the legal community to follow in widening access and equality of opportunity into the legal profession. By working with us, you can achieve something similar in your sector.

Innovation in practice

We have created innovative solutions that help our clients achieve their goals, and also address the issues they care about at the forefront of business and society. Our initiatives around social mobility are standout and have resulted in us being ranked as the joint UK leading employer in the Social Mobility Employer Index.

Ascensus

Ascensus

Our in-house legal services and business leader programme. Supporting, developing and connecting clients and industry specialists internationally.

Ascensus programme
Executive coaching for business leaders

Executive coaching for business leaders

Executive coaching to help you enhance your leadership skills, navigate organisational challenges, and achieve your goals strategically as a business leader.

Executive coaching
Instant in-house

Instant in-house

Our innovative fixed-fee retainer product which provides clients with instant access to a team of our lawyers for a fixed monthly fee. 

Instant in-house
Grow

Grow

Grow is our legal support programme exclusively for startups. It’s carefully tailored for companies at any stage of the startup journey from protecting an idea through to a successful exit.

Legal support for startups
FAIRE: Fairer Access Into Real Experience

FAIRE: Fairer Access Into Real Experience

Our award winning FAIRE (Fairer Access Into Real Experience) social mobility programme, revolutionising the way law firms encourage diverse talent into the profession, and to grow an industry-wide culture of inclusivity. 

FAIRE events
REACH mentoring programme

REACH mentoring programme

Our award-winning REACH (Race, Equality and Cultural Heritage) mentoring programme provides support to ambitious black students aged 16+ and helps them kickstart their career in the legal sector.

REACH programme
#PositivePurpose: Making a difference across business and society

#PositivePurpose: Making a difference across business and society

Showcasing the work of clients making a difference across business and society. Ambitious stories of innovation, and collaboration, from Healthtech to regeneration.

Positive change

Developing technology

Our technological advancements help streamline operations and better support both our internal teams and clients. We are continually enhancing our approach and how we blend people, processes, technology, and data, to provide the best outcomes. 

Our continuous innovation journey has involved investing in IT systems and technology. We have integrated AI into our daily operations to drive efficiencies, and applied learnings from partnership projects to improve our legal services. 

This has included developing our own generative AI chatbot Jac for day-to-day operational efficiencies, automation software for scanning documents and machine learning tools for real estate title creation and lease reviews. Embracing emerging technologies like AI complements our lawyers’ knowledge and expertise by improving accuracy and efficiency in how we serve clients.  

Within Browne Jacobson we have developed an AI Academy, and hold AI awareness months, including: competitions for the best use case for Jac; webinars about tools we have tested, mythbusting, and ethical discussions about bias, transparency, and accountability; and surveys to understand how people are feeling about AI.  

Working with clients has also helped us to identify innovations in our own continuous improvement journey. We encourage constant constructive feedback. By identifying friction, barriers and blockers, we identify areas for innovation. At that point we discuss ideas and refine them, drawing upon our extensive pool of experts. The ultimate goal is to deliver better results in quicker time, with fewer costs and ideally driving bigger return on investments.

Key contacts

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