After more than 20 years of driving change in the legal industry, Baker Donelson's innovative approach to legal service delivery is unmatched. Our dedicated in-house operations and consultancy team, which is led by one of the most influential thought leaders in this space, works closely with our attorneys and clients to implement cutting-edge, tailored solutions that advance our clients' legal and business goals.
Baker Donelson has been at the forefront of numerous legal industry innovations. Some of our most notable accomplishments include:
- Among the first law firms to develop its own proprietary legal project management platform
- Co-authored the American Bar Association's book on legal project management (first and second editions)
- Among the first law firms to build an in-house team of professionals dedicated to legal innovation and operations beginning in 2011
- Among the first law firms to utilize artificial intelligence for contract review and due diligence
- Served in leadership roles for the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) since the organization's inception (CLOC is the largest international community of legal operations professionals)
- Co-authored and designed CLOC's eBook on matter lifecycle management for legal teams
- Launched innovative partnerships with the University of Richmond School of Law Legal Business Design Hub and the Baylor Law Executive LL.M. in Litigation Management
- Serve as consultants to in-house legal departments for process improvement, project management, and legal technology for corporate clients
Client-Focused Solutions that Drive Value
Baker Donelson approaches client value as an ongoing commitment. Our Client Solutions and Innovation Team includes nationally recognized professionals who are subject matter experts in project management, process improvement, pricing, data analytics, knowledge management, artificial intelligence/machine learning, litigation support, and research. Working closely with our attorneys and clients, the team identifies, develops, and implements innovative solutions that improve efficiency, enhance transparency, increase predictability, and deliver value in the way our clients define it.
Complementing these efforts, our Client Experience and Value Team helps ensure the client's voice remains at the center of how we build relationships, deliver legal services, and identify opportunities for improvement. Through client feedback, journey mapping, relationship planning, and collaboration with our innovation professionals, the team helps translate client expectations and insights into meaningful actions that strengthen service delivery and improve outcomes.
Together, our innovation and client experience professionals help ensure Baker Donelson is continuously listening, learning, and evolving. By combining client feedback, technology, process improvement, and practical legal solutions, we help clients achieve greater efficiency, predictability, transparency, and value throughout their relationship with our Firm.
Practice Enhancement
Clients increasingly want to understand how their legal partners are using artificial intelligence to improve efficiency, accelerate delivery, provide new value, and enhance the quality and consistency of legal services. Baker Donelson has been at the forefront of AI adoption in the legal industry, deploying cutting-edge AI tools broadly across the Firm, including Harvey.ai, Spellbook, and Orbital – among others.
Our Practice Enhancement Initiative builds on these larger Firm efforts by moving beyond individual productivity gains to deploying AI at scale across teams and practice groups. The goal is to deliver consistent quality and value to clients, so the impact of AI is felt universally, regardless of which Baker Donelson attorneys are handling their matters. Led by our Practice Enhancement and eDiscovery Officer, and supported by dedicated and experienced Practice Enhancement attorneys, our Practice Enhancement Team develops tailored, AI-enabled solutions for our clients. Below are examples of the solutions we've developed.
- Redesigning the contract negotiation process by deploying AI solutions that promote consistency and speed, including drafting playbooks, client-specific contract vaults, and agentic workflows that link tools together to create automated processes.
- Reengineering due diligence processes by leveraging a suite of transactional AI tools to digest data, accelerate diligence review, and ultimately prepare diligence memoranda, with attorneys validating the work.
- Accelerating repetitive document creation using standardized workflows and AI-powered agents to improve efficiency and consistency across recurring matters.
- Rethinking litigation intelligence to turn historical case information into actionable insights, enabling litigators to prepare for trial more effectively and strategically by, among other things, better anticipating opposing counsel's strategy for mock jury exercises, converting prior deposition transcripts into data-driven deposition preparation playbooks, and building verdict databases that help trial teams identify winning themes and assess expert effectiveness.
- Leveraging AI to revisit discovery and privilege review to classify document collections, find facts earlier, identify custodians and legacy data, generate consistent and defensible privilege log entries, and stress-test privilege logs to identify where supplementation may be needed.
- Developing tailored, practice-specific workflows across data privacy, intellectual property, corporate, real estate, litigation, labor and employment, and other areas.
Attorney judgment remains central to this work. Our Firm policy requires lawyers to carefully review AI-generated work, take ownership of the output, and confirm its accuracy. The Firm also works with clients to identify opportunities to leverage AI and other innovative solutions to help in-house legal teams operate more effectively and efficiently.
Helping Legal Departments Reinvent their Teams
Baker Donelson helps in-house legal teams tackle their operational issues so they can function more effectively and efficiently and ultimately increase their value to their organizations. The members of our Client Solutions and Innovation team have extensive experience working with legal departments of all sizes, industries, and levels of sophistication. This experience gives them a unique, big-picture perspective and the practical know-how to make meaningful and measurable impact. Our approach to in-house legal operations is consultative, working first to understand a client's goals and then providing the tools and resources needed to achieve those goals.