“The engagement now from senior management across all firms is excellent and I don’t think we’ve ever had that sort of support but equally, we shouldn’t all be throwing out the good practice about implementing technology, and we seem to have kind of done that as well.”
I’m chatting with Nathan Hayes, director of IT at global arbitration boutique Three Crowns, who started in February this year, after a year’s sabbatical.
Hayes was previously international IT Director at Osborne Clarke, responsible for delivering the firm’s global IT strategy and helping Osborne Clarke to grow across Europe, Asia and North America. With 2,000 staff across 26 locations, OC is a very different animal to Three Crowns, which has around 180 people across offices in key arbitration centres London, Madrid, Paris, Singapore and Washington.
“I was very pleased and slightly surprised to find Three Crowns because I was looking for a single partnership,” Hayes says. Osborne Clarke, if you’re not familiar, is a Swiss verein, meaning that the OCV member firms are all separate legal entities, which is not uncommon among UK international law firms. It enabled OC and other such as Norton Rose Fulbright to grow fast, but it’s inevitably not without its challenges.
“I wanted a hyper focused business, one that was smaller but equally I wanted a firm that was international, because I really enjoyed that aspect,” Hayes says. “Also, I wanted a top tier law firm, and Three Crowns are ranked second globally in terms of international arbitration, just behind King & Spalding. When you look at the firms they are compared with, the first is King & Spalding, the second is Three Crowns, third is Quinn Emanuel, fourth is White & Case and fifth is Herbert Smith Freehills, so they are definitely top tier. I also wanted a big security element, and Three Crowns is involved in nation state disputes. Security is key for every law firm, but even more so for the likes of Three Crowns.”
Hayes also quite fancied a firm that does some maritime law, although that hasn’t materialised. Why? “It’s just purely my personal interest. When I was on my sabbatical, I went offshore racing and kite surfing,” he says, adding, “I highly recommend it.”
Back on dry land, Hayes is responsible for all aspects of Three Crowns’ information technology internationally. He reports to CEO Hugh Carlson, who joined from Harvard, where he lectured in law. Carlson has the interesting career history of being a former associate at Millbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy and also a software engineer. Earlier this year, he led a project with CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, to develop a prototype of an AI-powered cross-examination training platform. The platform leverages GenAI to create real-life simulations and enable users to hone their cross-examination skills.
“What really appeals to me is their hyper focus on international arbitration and that allows us as a business to leverage technology for delivering and supporting that particular practise area,” Hayes says. “Certainly with other large multi-practise, multidisciplinary law firms, they’re having to spread their resources quite thin because they’re obviously trying to support a whole plethora of different practise areas. But Three Crowns has that benefit of being a boutique, being a very hyper-focused business that we can really engage technology to support in a way we haven’t done yet.”
He adds: “Three Crowns is 10 years old; it’s still young business and what I’m fascinated about is how can technology support the delivery of international arbitration. And obviously GenAI is going to be a significant part to that, but not the only part.”
While at Osborne Clarke, Hayes delivered the firm’s cloud and mobile first initiatives but also its first foray in GenAI with its chatbot, OCGPT.
Hayes says that the transition of the industry to being so tech-focused is welcome but says: “We see use cases but also a lot of confusion. It’s good that firms are being open and supportive of experimentation but simply giving people the tool with a small bit of guidance isn’t enough. There’s a best practice of tech implementation and we seem to be skipping that.”
He adds: “We’ve got to remind ourselves to use those tools that we’ve spent decades developing and those mechanisms and those best practises around implementing technology.”
On the core tech side, Three Crowns is Aderant, iManage Cloud and InterAction. They also use Litera Compare. Microsoft is a key part of the tech stack and the firm is using Copilot for administrative work including searching for emails, transcribing, summarising meetings etc.
It’s still fairly early days for Hayes and the firm is in assessment phase on the roadmap, but there are plans to increase investment in tech and he says: “In terms of being the leading arbitration firm globally, that’s a very clear objective, which is incredibly helpful because it helps me to understand what kind of IT service we’ve got to provide to achieve that, which is a globally leading technology service for professional services, so it’s really building a strategy around that.
“Obviously yes, it’s getting all of the operations specs right in terms of finance and BD and document management and so on, but we’re really exploring working very closely with our legal teams to see how technology can enable that legal service delivery around international arbitration. That for me is going to be the secret sauce.”
One of the challenges around high-end litigation teams and firms can be a lack of good data or standardisation. There are early signs in the industry of this changing and the routine element of even the most complex matters being recorded and systematised. To what extent is this relevant and a priority at Three Crowns?
“That’s something that’s on the list,” Hayes says. “Some of it’s been done to a degree, but there’s a lot more that can be that can be done and a lot more value that can be added.
“Law has always struggled with engaging with case management systems when it’s anything beyond very high volume, low value, and repeatable work and that’s always a challenge if it’s described in that way, and you see it as an end-to-end process which is automated. It’s about trying to move away from that and not describe it as such, but to consider it as supporting particular steps in a process. That process is going to be highly variable because it will vary between cases, but individual steps won’t. Individual steps are going to be repetitive, they are going to be activities which people undertake on a regular basis. So, it’s trying to break it down into its component parts and saying, ‘OK, what aspects of this can we support? What steps can we support?’ And then it’s up to our people to then choose which elements they engage in, in what order, at what point in time.
“It’s enabling people to manage their workloads in a better way and trying to find that balance between matter of management and process automation and bringing the two together. The only way you can do that is by getting under the skin of what that process looks like, and that takes a lot of heavy lifting. There’s a lot of time involved in getting that engagement, getting that understanding, but that’s one of the advantages of working in a firm which is so hyperfocused: you don’t have to do that across a lot of different process flows and different service lines or sub service lines and so by having that focus it means that we can go deeper in that particular area of service delivery.”
In terms of GenAI, Hayes says there are a number of different strategies for firms to follow to achieve genuine engagement and right now is about learning how to exercise a muscle within the business in terms of a new area of activity and prompt engineering, etc. “Any platform, frankly, is going to help them do that as long as they engage with it, and that’s the crucial bit for me is making sure that we’ve got the wrapper around all of this, which ensures that there is engagement.
“Simply putting it on their desks and just saying ‘use this like you would Google’ is just never going to get the kind of engagement and traction that we need to be able to develop use cases within.” We come right back to good tech implementation practice and Hayes says: “All of those elements I talked about earlier are crucial for success.”