Norton Rose Fulbright wins second consecutive “International Law Firm Innovation” award

Global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright has been awarded “International Law Firm Innovation” for the second year in a row at the annual Legal Innovation Awards.

The Awards, now in their seventh year, recognise exceptional achievement in the legal sector and work on precedent-setting, game-changing projects and initiatives.

This year, Legal Week recognised Norton Rose Fulbright for its work in developing a new model for dealing with litigation following a significant cyber-attack. The firm’s work in this area involves dealing with both high volume individual claims across multiple jurisdictions and complex and high value group claims.  This has been achieved by developing a technology-based model that is being used to ensure the coordinated and efficient defence of thousands of claims globally.

A multi-disciplinary and cross-border Norton Rose Fulbright team developed this client solution. It drew on the expertise of the firm’s cyber specialists, cross border commercial disputes specialists, and data privacy team, who worked with the Norton Rose Fulbright legal project managers, a development operations team, a small claims team in the NRF Newcastle Hub, and local Norton Rose Fulbright and other counsel teams across multiple jurisdictions. Many of the teams came from the NRF Transform programme.

David Carter, chief product officer at Norton Rose Fulbright and global lead, NRF Transform, commented:

“We’re thrilled to have received this accolade for a second year in a row. We aim to set new standards in the delivery of technology-enabled legal services for clients. In this case we were able to “scale up” the market leading expertise of our cyber and litigation teams, so that their strategic approach could be applied across thousands of simultaneously evolving cases.”

Ffion Flockhart, partner and global co-head of data protection, privacy and cybersecurity at Norton Rose Fulbright said:

“In the last 12 months alone, our team has helped clients respond to dozens of major cyber-attacks, each involving complex forensic investigations and giving rise to wide-ranging legal issues. Developing a technology based solution to handling the increasing trend of follow-on claims has been crucial in allowing clients to adopt a more strategic and streamlined approach to managing those claims.”

Harriet Jones-Fenleigh, dispute resolution partner at Norton Rose Fulbright added:

“This holistic approach, combining our litigation and cyber expertise with the technological skills of our specialist legal technology team, is not only geared towards providing clients with a solution which is efficient and cost effective, it also ensures a consistent approach to drive a successful defence strategy in the face of complex group litigation as well as large volumes of individual claims.”

In 2020, the firm won Legal Week’s “International Law Firm Innovation” for developing the solution, “Claim Control”, in order to help airlines track, review and defend against EC261 claims relating to flight delays and cancellations, and reduce ‘value leakage’ from airlines' bottom lines.