West: Future of legal services is not just about legal advice
Leading City law firm Kennedys has spun off its technology development into a separate business, dubbing its ‘Kennedys, without the lawyers’.
The aim of Kennedys IQ is to be “the global go-to company for technology driven solutions at the intersection of legal and insurance”.
It has 30 staff, including 13 who work for Kennedys Cognitive Computing in India. Mike Gilpin, formerly director of IT, has moved over to become Kennedys IQ’s commercial director, with Karim Derrick moving from head of R&D to product and innovation director.
Richard West, partner and head of the innovations group at Kennedys, is a board director of Kennedys IQ alongside senior partner Nick Thomas.
The new company also has a governance group, which comprises managing partner Suzanne Liversidge, Mr West, Mr Gilpin, Mr Derrick, and Rosie LeGros and Jo Woods, Kennedys’ directors of business development and finance respectively.
Kennedys has long marketed its technology offering as a way for clients to use lawyers less as part of building a deeper relationship with them.
Kennedys IQ is a single platform that pulls together multiple data points and then uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to uncover claims trends and best practice, as well as insight into how the client’s business is performing, what its competitors are doing, and what trends are emerging in the industry.
An example of this is its Portal Manager tool, which analyses Ministry of Justice portal claims, providing claims handlers with aggregated information about their claims as well as the status of individual claims, fraud analysis, medical reports and tactics being adopted by claimant solicitors.
Portal Manager is one of six smart tools on the platform that clients can switch on and off to automate or manage the day-to-day claims process.
The others, which formed part of what was previously known as the Kennedys Toolkit, are: Incident Manager, Fraud Detector, Defence Lawyer (powered by Kennedys’ long-standing KLAiM system), Settlement Negotiator and Recovery Manager.
IQ Platform also performs AI functions, such as predicting medical damages and making automatic settlement recommendations.
Work on the firm’s internal operating efficiency will remain in-house at the firm.
Mr Derrick said: “Kennedys IQ delivers on the promise of technology to help our global claims clients run better and more effective businesses, turning to Kennedys’ lawyers only when expert legal advice is needed.
“We know claims and we know the law. And we believe that data and technology have the potential to achieve those results, by automating day-to-day processes and unlocking powerful claims insights. The collective legal expertise we have globally underpins all of our tools and leads to better solutions for our clients, and their customers, with tools that can be adapted in every jurisdiction.
“This combination makes Kennedys IQ by far the most sophisticated system to hit the global claims market and shows we are committed to helping our clients use lawyers less, while still benefiting from our expertise.”
Mr West added: “We are setting up the right modern structures to keep Kennedys at the forefront of client-facing innovation. We can see that the future of legal services is not just about legal advice; rather, we are expert strategic advisors who work with clients to optimise their businesses.
“The IQ platform offers huge potential for development, and Kennedys IQ will help us create an agile environment suited to the incubation of software product-based businesses and consultancy services.”