Kennedys bolsters innovation capabilities with new development team in India

We are pleased to announce that we have strengthened our innovation capabilities with the opening of a new business, Kennedys Kognitive Computing, and the appointment of a nine-strong development team in India.

The team of IT experts will be headed by Tony Joseph, who has more than 15 years’ experience in technology businesses and, in turn, will report to our Head of Research and Development, Karim Derrick.

Our relationship with the team was formalised in July 2017 with the arrangement of an exclusive partnership – the success of which has resulted in the creation of a new company in India, and now sees the team join us and operate from Kerala, India.

Focused on technologies such as rapid prototyping, application development, text analytics, machine learning and blockchain, the addition of the team will accelerate the development of our award-winning innovations and the strategic desire to reduce legal spend for clients.

We are excited to be welcoming this excellent and proven team into the Kennedys family. They will join our wider development team and will be focused on prototyping new products to begin with. This also gives us the ability to augment our existing development function quickly and effectively. We have long viewed technology as an enabler of change that can transform legal services for the benefit of both the industry and our clients
The arrival of Tony and his team supports our strategy on global innovation. We have been focused on legal tech for a number of years and have, over that time, developed a suite of innovative online products that form our Innovations Toolkit. These products are aimed at successfully helping our clients better manage their business and reduce their reliance on lawyers. This new team will benefit the development of our Toolkit and be able to prototype the superb ideas submitted to our Ideas Lab.

Primarily client-focused, the Ideas Lab is a platform through which any member of the firm can put forward their ideas about how to create future products and deliver modern legal services that are anchored to our core principle of helping clients only use lawyers when they really need one.

The initiative supports our strategy on global innovation and also works to engage clients with discussion around how digital developments, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain might be applied to their organisations to drive operational efficiencies and create new value.

Earlier this year, we also announced the appointment of two leading data scientists into our rapidly growing Data Science team in the latest chapter of our ambitious plans for technology innovation for the benefit of clients and our customers.