Herbert Smith Freehills joins Barclays Eagle Labs initiative

International law firm Herbert Smith Freehills today announces a partnership with Barclays Eagle Labs, a network of incubator spaces that aims to support entrepreneurs and ambitious businesses to connect, grow, and scale through collaboration with academia, law firms and investors.

Over the last seven years Barclays Eagle Labs have created a community of top innovators, industry experts and mentors to help support ambitious entrepreneurs and startups looking to scale as well as helping transform organisations and empower future skills. Eagle Labs also specialises in positively disrupting industries by bringing together key corporate players, industry bodies, leading universities and startups to enable rapid innovation and investment through collaboration to benefit the wider industry.

Herbert Smith Freehills will join the LawTech Lab, which is operated in partnership with the Law Society, alongside University College London and the University of Liverpool. The LawTech Lab seeks to help the UK’s legal industry to remain world-class by bringing together lawtech businesses and industry-leading law firms to help solve the challenges the industry is facing and facilitate collaborative solutions using legal innovation.

Through the partnership, Herbert Smith Freehills will provide guidance, feedback and mentoring to the lawtech businesses on their products. The firm will also contribute to events and workshops that foster collaboration. 

The news follows the appointment of Libby Jackson as Managing Partner for digital legal services earlier this year. Her new role is a key element of the firm's Ambition 2025 strategy, representing a commitment to help clients better meet and manage the changing regulatory environment brought about by digital transformation. The new role will also spearhead efforts to help clients understand the commercial opportunities available to them through digital transformation.

Libby Jackson comments: "We are continually looking for ways to contribute to the fast-growing LawTech ecosystem in the UK, and we have identified synergies between our own digital ambitions and those of Barclays Eagle Labs. We see this as a great opportunity to engage our teams' expertise to help shape the future of the legal sector and influence the development of new legal technologies to the benefit of both the sector and ultimately the broader business community who call on our services."