As the Europe Director of Innovation at Dentons, Marie Bernard is a passionate promoter of technology and innovation within the firm. She joins the Chief Innovators Q&A at Lexpo 2017. Bernard took a moment out of her busy schedule to discuss her passion behind legal tech and innovation.
How did you first get into legal tech and innovation?
A few years back, the CEO of Dentons Europe was looking for someone who could entirely focus on 
pushing the innovation agenda within the firm. Someone to ensure we deliver on our innovation promise. He called me explaining his vision and offered me to create the role. That was not only a blank page to fill in. That was also a beautiful proof of trust!
I had no other qualification than knowing my firm’s European market inside out, being the independent mind of the gang, and also being able to listen and connect the dots. Fortunately, that was a greenfield environment at the time: I’ve learned everything else on the spot. I’ve been working every day since to fill the page and deserve the trust.
Why are you so passionate about it?
Seriously? Working in legal innovation within Dentons and Nextlaw Labs is a door opener. It allows to embracing so much in an accelerated pace of time. It’s a fantastic place to be to learn new things every day, in a surprisingly granular and concrete way. Who else in Europe has the luxury to interact with so many different people in so many different roles and structures across Europe, and beyond?
Today, I had breakfast with people who sought feedback to redesign the curriculum of their law school, caught up with our Knowledge people on critical projects, exchanged about a solution to accelerate the shift to e-Justice in one country, submitted a proposal to digitalize access to justice for refugees in European hotspots, reviewed with my team the work in progress of pilots going on in several Europe countries, and I’m off to a work meeting with one of our investment startups from South Africa. And it’s only early in the afternoon.
What’s the greatest challenge in your work today?
Prioritization and execution. Every new person I meet, every single conversation is a new opportunity, a new occasion to stretch our collective comfort zone. It’s probably a frequent problem, but the thing of it at the Dentons scale. Engaging with my colleagues could be a full-time job in itself, so multiply this with clients, providers, investments…
Additionally, I cannot conceive the essence of this job as a fully optimized meeting schedule. If you want to stay awake to new opportunities, you have to still get some space for an unexpected conversation, a coffee with no strings attached… At the end of the day, the critical mass of information and new ideas is so huge! You barely have a chance to digest and channel the information before a new day starts… Fortunately, this is teamwork; there are more and more people around able to undertake, support and make the most of this harvest of opportunities.
What’s the one single message you’ll want to leave with the Lexpo audience members?
It’s an ideal time to get started! The mentalities are shifting. As an ecosystem, Europe legal tech increasingly produces more ‘doers’ and less ‘talkers’. And those who get to do things, also grab the brutal truth of innovation: you may not get it right the first time. You may not even get it right the tenth time. But if you don’t try, for yourself, then you’ll never get it right at all. At the beginning, people were telling me: we have no idea what Nextlaw Labs is doing. And I was thinking for myself ”you also have no idea of how long it takes to get one idea off the ground, let alone of how many times you need to try to get a viable thing”.
In the space of a couple of times, that mindset has changed, and our ecosystem is more exploration-friendly and collaborative, than press-release avid and competitive. So identify a pain point, roll up your sleeves, dive in and enjoy!
You can follow Marie on Twitter.