Bonn Steichen & Partners Strengthens Its Legal Innovation Strategy

Fabio Trevisan, partner and Harmonie Méraud, senior associate of the Bonn Steichen & Partners law firm, talk about digitalization, open data and technological collaboration, among others.

Photo: Fabio Trevisan, Partner at Bonn Steichen & Partners, explains how the law firm automates the processing and analysis of legal data / Credits © Bonn Steichen & Partners

Bonn Steichen & Partners is an independent full-service law firm based in Luxembourg. How did the digitalisation of law affect its practices in the last few years?

Faced with a highly competitive globalised market, we have adapted our tools and working methods in order to meet our clients’ needs in a pragmatic, efficient and ever-faster way. As we are aware that some of our international clients could be led to choose their lawyers by assessing, among other criteria, their presentation and reputation on the web, we completely rebuilt in 2018 our visual identity, changed our logo and redesigned our website so that our business partners have a clear view of our services, activities and our lawyers. We have also strengthened Bonn Steichen & Partners‘ visibility on social networks (LinkedIn, Instagram) by regularly sharing relevant news with our business partners.

We have set up a secure exchange platform to facilitate the exchange of documents with our clients. To ensure that all our lawyers have access to it, we have digitised local case laws and created an internal database.

For many years now, we have set up a secure internal network so that all our lawyers can access our server remotely, thus facilitating access to files, the organisation of our work and responsiveness to our business partners. This approach has notably enabled us to ensure full continuity of service from the very start of the Covid-19 crisis, avoiding any disruption in the services rendered to our clients.

Moreover, in order to improve the quality of our deliverables and to provide real support to our clients’ business, we are constantly thinking about innovative ways of communicating and anchoring legal solutions with our partners. In particular, recently, we have started implementing a Legal Design plan. To this end, we collaborate with a professional legal designer so that our lawyers are trained in this area and evolve in their ways of presenting our deliverables to courts, clients, and our audience. We can target the expectations of our clients and prospects and provide them with better presented, easier to acknowledge and relevant solutions. Our lawyers also have online access to training courses enabling them to develop both their business skills and their soft skills, which help them in their professional and personal development.

Last but not least, we are delighted to be working with Predictice to automate the processing and analysis of legal data, which is the raw material for our work.

The development of Open data in the judicial sector would unquestionably be an asset for our firm to better help our clients and more generally for all litigants, who will thus be able to access court decisions way more efficiently and transparently. It will also promote equality between litigants, no matter if they are part of Big law or a solo practitioner, and all will have equal access to the information they need to defend their rights. Better informed, economic players will be able to take reasonable decisions. Certain “small” disputes could by this means be avoided or resolved through out of court settlements, or mediation. This transparency could help to improve and streamline the functioning of certain jurisdictions, reducing the waiting time for litigants. Access to and dissemination to all judicial decisions is a genuine democratic issue, which will strengthen citizens’ confidence in the judiciary system, therefore in the rule of law, the essence of all democracies.

In view of the legislation applicable in Luxembourg on the protection of personal data and privacy, we believe that an in-depth assessment must nevertheless be carried out on the modalities of the implementation process of Open Data, in order to preserve the privacy of litigants. Indeed, contrary to the US, where full transparency is the rule, our society is not ready to have all decisions published unredacted, with the full names of the parties disclosed to the wide public.

Bonn Steichen & Partners has been collaborating with Predictice for several months. What are your main benefits?

The first evident benefit of our collaboration is the improvement of our efficiency and the quality of the legal solutions we provide to our business partners. Indeed, Predictice enables us to process a large amount of data in a matter of seconds, to compare French case law and to select the most relevant judicial decisions to better reply to requests and needs of our clients. This innovative technology is therefore an effective tool enabling us to offer our clients faster, more targeted and more tailored responses, helping them to grow in their respective business with more confidence and security.

Analytical reports establishing the chances of success of cases according to predefined criteria are also high value-added tools, as they allow us to better target the courts’ dominant position on a specific issue, to try and better anticipate the reasoning and decisions of courts, and thus to give more accurate and efficient advice to our clients. These reports help us to improve litigation strategy and, in some cases, can be used to try to avoid an open court case, as a basis for negotiating with our adversaries.

Based on this experience, we wish to continue our collaboration in order to develop a high-performance data analysis system that meets the specific requirements of the Luxembourg market.

***

Conference registration

Any person who wishes to attend the conference « Innovations dans le monde juridique luxembourgeois : état des lieux et perspectives » can first register through the following link.

Total
0
Shares
Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Posts
Total
0
Share