Seyfarth’s unique internal competition to further boost innovation, the SEYence Fair, was featured in The American Lawyer, “Seyfarth Develops Firm Science Fair to ‘Drive Innovating Thinking,’” on December 31. The article highlights how Seyfarth continues to cultivate a forward-facing mindset by “leaning on its history of project management and process improvement to hire and allocate resources toward generative Al and other tools that can streamline work for lawyers and their clients.”

The SEYence Fair, suggested by several firm lawyers and modeled on school science fairs, developed into an open call for projects that netted nearly 60 submissions from more than 80 attorneys and professionals across six departments and multiple functional areas, all of whom looked at how technological process and AI-related functionality could improve the practice and business of law in various ways.

The winner was an innovative AI-based tool designed to scrape specific sources to find, aggregate, and report information so that attorneys can be more efficient in servicing their clients. This project is currently being developed by the firm’s inhouse technology innovations team, Seyfarth Labs.

Seyfarth chair and managing partner Lorie Almon, prominently quoted in the story, said, “This is where Al, when really well-trained, combined with the bots, can do something very different. It can read 100 websites, all of which might be different, formatted differently, and pull the information the way a human could.”

Almon continued, “As corny as SEYence Fair’ sounds on some level, ideas like this are very important culturally to Seyfarth. Your clients want you to look around the corner, help them solve their problems. And to get that, you have to have a culture that encourages collaboration, encourages thinking outside the box, and understands you can pilot and try things, and sometimes they won’t work, sometimes they will work. I think we’ve done a good job of encouraging that culture at Seyfarth. But you have to nurture it every day.”

The full article is available here.