Business of Law Firms
Allen & Overy’s Fuse – tech incubator​

By Jake Rickman​

What do you need to know this week?

This week’s Business of Law Firms series explores the business case behind Allen & Overy’s coveted incubator programme, Fuse, and its relevance in regards to the perennial conversations that surround legal tech.

As reported by The Lawyer, this week, Allen & Overy (A&O) concluded its seventh annual round of selecting intakes into its legal tech incubator programme known as Fuse.

226 companies applied to join Fuse but only 11 new brands made this year’s cut, with four additional startups carried over from last year’s cohort. Below is an overview of Fuse’s cohort for this year, along with a description of each brand’s products (based on Allen & Overy’s announcement):

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(NB, legal tech refers to products designed primarily for lawyers rather than their clients).

What is a tech incubator?

Generally speaking, tech incubators are programmes designed to link early-stage tech businesses with capital (cash) and resources designed to propel the businesses forward and enhance their growth potential.

Tech incubators are common in the venture capital investment world, with some of the world’s largest venture capital funds having their own incubator programmes (e.g., Sequoia Capital’s Sequoia Arc). From the investor’s point of view, by assembling a portfolio of early-stage tech companies in which they invest money and other resources, investors are taking a punt that at least one of them will grow in value and provide a substantial return on the initial investment.

This being the case, you might wonder what a large law firm like A&O is doing investing in tech companies. While A&O is not the only large law firm to run an incubator, it is important to point out that Fuse is not strictly speaking an investment platform. A&O rarely takes equity stakes in the businesses that make its cohort list. Instead, A&O provides its Fuse cohorts with access to its extensive knowledge base and face time with lawyers. This enables the Fuse-sponsored businesses to refine their products for future use.

How is this topic relevant to your interviews and applications?

Legal tech is a popular topic for many applicants to raise in their applications and interviews. One reason perhaps relates to the wider tendency for market commentators to focus on the next great tech disruptor (which currently seems to be artificial intelligence, having replaced the furore that surrounded blockchain before it).

The challenge when discussing legal tech in an interview context is identifying the business relevance to the law firm in question without getting lost in the seductive and unfocused notion of technology more generally. One of the best ways to do this is to look at how law firms actually make use of technology solutions and analyse the business case behind their use.

In A&O’s case with Fuse, we might ask what benefits A&O obtains, especially considering they do not usually invest any capital into their cohort brands. The obvious benefit is that A&O has the opportunity to be an early adopter of its sponsored brands. While the exact terms of engagement between Fuse/A&O and its sponsored businesses are private, we can reasonably speculate A&O likely makes use of the legal tech products and connects its clients with technology products relevant to their needs. This effectively gives A&O a head start over its competitors when it comes to adapting legal tech solutions without investing significant cash into technology upstarts.

By researching the kinds of products A&O sponsors through its incubator, you can start to get a sense of the actual use-case for technology products. In turn, you can tailor your discussion of legal tech to the practice groups most relevant to your target firms.

For instance, the number of tech products targeted towards legal drafting should indicate how much time and energy lawyers spend drafting documents. Clearly, there is a demand for tools that make this process quicker and more efficient.

Likewise, there are at least three products in Fuse’s current intake designed to facilitate better communication between clients and their legal and financial advisers when it comes to managing transactions. This suggests that there is a demand for tools and systems that make project management between clients and their advisers more efficient.