Our innovative culture

We know that innovation is about more than having the latest tech.  We also know that having an innovative culture is good for our clients too.

We are working hard to grow an open, collaborative, curious innovative culture that rewards our people for generating ideas and getting involved in innovation projects. Here’s three practical examples:

CMS #hacks: Our ideas platform, powered by Crowdicity, was launched in December 2018 and since that time we have generated more than 350 ideas and touched almost every corner of our business with over 680 comments and 5,800 votes. Centred around challenges, we have generated ideas and discussion on topics as diverse as new client facing products, improving day to day work life, services to how we can all be a little bit greener, addressing pain points of working on a matter, and how to make remote working better to name a few.  The best ideas have been rewarded with prizes like a trip to Silicon Valley and conference tickets to tech shows.  Engagement on the platform has been enthusiastic with authors and stakeholders working together, and now many areas across CMS are benefiting from new products, enhanced ways of working and improvements in the workplace. Find out more about #CMS hacks.

Innovation Hours: When we uncover ideas that we think might transform how we work, our innovation hours framework kicks in to help build multi-disciplinary tools to investigate, experiment and create solutions.  We make sure our lawyers are rewarded for innovation in exactly the same way as they are for client work – making sure there are no barriers for working on innovation projects.  We treat our innovation projects like startups so they don’t get strangled before they start.  This way we can bring new ideas and solutions to clients more quickly.

FT Global legal Hackathon:  In 2020, more than 50 CMS employees from a wide range of legal fields, support teams and jurisdictions formed seven teams that took part in the "FT Innovative Lawyers Hackathon" organized by the Global Legal Hackathon (GLH). With more than 2,500 participants from over 70 countries, around 200 organisations and about 300 projects, there was great interest in this year's "Global Legal Hackathon 2020," which once again brought together lawyers, software developers, designers and business people to develop solutions to important economic and socio-political challenges.  All of the CMS teams worked collaboratively and produced fantastic prototype products.

You can find out more about CMS by Design by browsing our webpages or you can download our CMS By Design brochure. If you are unsure about how innovation could help your business you can also get in touch with the CMS by Design Innovation team: bydesign@cms-cmno.com to find out what mix of innovation tools / teams are available from CMS by Design and how your business could benefit from them.