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Fuse is designed to bring forward-thinking tech companies together with clients and Allen & Overy experts to develop practical solutions to legal, regulatory and deal-related issues.

As a leading law firm, we are creating solutions to some of the most intractable challenges faced by companies, financial institutions and law firms today. In the changing world around us, we are proud to have the vision, mind-set and ambition to build solutions that shape the future of law, whatever it may hold.

As demand from clients to receive legal services in new and flexible ways grows, we are seeking to match those changing expectations.

Since opening in 2017, Fuse has engaged with over 10,000 external visitors and has now launched its fifth cohort virtually. Each new cohort brings a range of companies into Fuse, with the primary aim of creating a multidisciplinary environment in which cohort members, clients and Allen & Overy lawyers can test solutions that bring together world-class legal analysis with best-in-class technology.

For trainees, our Fuse space is the perfect place to explore new technology, redefine and realise their own ambitions and develop into lawyers of the future.

The legal market is currently experiencing an accelerated rate of change. Our Fuse space is Allen & Overy’s way of embracing technology in two particular areas of innovation:

LegalTech (technology supporting legal advice, law firms and in-house legal functions) and FinTech (technology that seeks to improve and automate the delivery and use of financial services).

Fuse empowers Allen & Overy to rethink. Working with LegalTech companies, we rethink how we do our work. The FinTechs nominated by our clients allow us to rethink what expertise we need to gain. With our fifth cohort, I hope to connect our lawyers and clients seamlessly with the best tools on the market – providing opportunities for us to learn, innovate and deepen our relationships across the ecosystem.

Shruti Ajitsaria
Partner and Head of Fuse

Industry Firsts

In collaboration with Avvoka and the Loan Markets Association, Fuse was integral in facilitating the creation of LMA.Automate, a secure cloud-based subscription technology product providing users with an end-to-end platform for the automation of documents for the banking and finance market.

Fuse played host to the successful issuance from Nivaura of the world’s first fully automated cryptocurrency-denominated bond and the first structured product to be transacted and custodied, in each case using blockchain.

Fuse has also prompted the launch of numerous client and internal product pilots and collaborations, including our global practices embracing new technologies from Legatics, Define, StructureFlow and Kira following successful trials.

Cohort 5

Our most recent cohort joined Fuse in 2021, joining Fuse alumni Avvoka, Define, Legatics and StructureFlo.

The new LegalTech companies in residence are shown below. Also, for the second time in Fuse, six new FinTech residents have been chosen in collaboration with some of Allen & Overy's clients, including Barclays, Citi, Goldman Sachs and ING.

Atticus

Makes the process of verification more efficient, whilst also reducing risk with clear protocols and version control and improving the experience of verification for all stakeholders.

CiteRight

Helps litigation teams by making it easy to create a library of reusable research and court submission materials on its collaboration platform.

Draftwise

Helps lawyers to draft new contracts, quickly find relevant precedents and manage preferred clauses and defined terms, all within Microsoft Word.

Greenomy

Simplifies the process for achieving continuous compliance with ESG and sustainability regulatory disclosure requirements.

Humanloop

Helps lawyers to rapidly train AI systems that can classify contracts or extract key information from documents.

Amplifi

Helps internal legal teams objectively assess and simplify the language used in contracts and other legal documents.

Arteria

Helps organisations contract faster and turn executed contracts into data by applying artificial intelligence and a data-first approach to the drafting, negotiation and analysis of contracts.

Elliptic

Helps law firms with forensic investigations on cryptocurrency transactions. It also provides due diligence on Virtual Asset Providers and consultations on crypto compliance.

Liquidly

Helps private banks and fund managers to provide investors with the option for liquidity by building custom, closed marketplaces.

Solidatus

Helps lawyers and legal professionals to link documents, data, process, policy, regulation and people to provide a holistic, actionable organisational blueprint.

Vault Platform

Helps lawyers and other investigating parties take an innovative approach to increasing the quality of misconduct reporting and resolution. Vault provides an auditable, centralised system of record for all misconduct reported to the company.

Cohort 4

Cohort 4 joined Fuse in 2020. Five new LegalTech companies and four new FinTech residents joined Fuse alumni Avvoka, Define, Nivaura and REGnosys.

Bryter

Help lawyers to automate their expert knowledge by using their no-code building platform to build, manage and sell interactive applications, thus enabling them to digitise and scale their services.

Clara

Help founders with many of the processes currently performed by lawyers, such as incorporating companies, drafting agreements, building cap tables and structuring data rooms.

Serein

Help clients to automate the review and mark-up of routine legal contracts using AI. By extracting data, lawyers can better understand and harness the information in their contracts.

Structureflow

Help lawyers to model complex legal structures and transactions more easily and visually. It enables static two-dimensional diagrams to become dynamic, data-rich, information maps, which can be accessed and navigated by multiple stakeholders as part of a transaction.

Orbital Witness

Help investors, developers, lenders and their professional advisors gain greater visibility into issues impacting value, liquidity and intended use of a real estate asset or portfolio by creating a universal risk rating system for property transactions.

Loan Optics

Streamline the primary and secondary loan implementation process to make the syndicated loan market digitally native, thus driving significant operational savings.

Proxymity

Provide a real-time and fully transparent electronic proxy voting solution. The platform removes the need for manual and often paper-based processing which slows down the current system and makes it opaque. It also offers a shareholder disclosure platform, which automates shareholder ID requests in industry-compliant formats without the need for any manual intervention.

Saphyre

Help firms to assess risk faster, speed up their ready to trade process with accuracy and eliminate redundant or inefficient processes in booking, confirmation and settlement. The platform organises data with an end-to-end workflow involving multiple stakeholders.
 

Secretarium

Help businesses to achieve fast, confidential computing by using cryptography, consensus Algorithms, and specialist hardware to achieve end-to-end encryption and tamper-proofing of data at rest, in transit and in use.

Cohort 3

The following companies joined the firm in May 2019:

Apiax

A start-up which builds tools aiming to create machine-readable rules, thus enabling customers to access complex financial regulations on a digital basis.

Define

A drafting tool which helps users to access defined terms and references in documents more easily, with the intention of speeding up the drafting process.

HIGHQ

A platform which seeks to provide social collaboration, secure file sharing and project management with the aim of improving efficiency and productivity.

Scissero

A legal AI platform that reads, drafts and marks up legal agreements on an automated basis.

Cohort 2

The following companies were selected to join Avvoka, Legatics and Nivaura for the second cohort:

Bloomsbury AI

An early-stage company that uses natural language understanding, cognitive capabilities and machine learning to create virtual assistants that can be taught to read, reason and communicate.

Kira Systems

Provides machine-learning technology for document review and analysis, which has been licensed by Allen & Overy.

Neota Logic

A provider of automation software, whose AI-powered app development platform enables professionals to build and deploy applications that automate legal expertise, processes and documents.

Regnosys

A fintech company which leverages the open source to deliver “machine executable regulation” and drive radical change in the financial industry’s approach to regulatory compliance.

Signal Media

An AI-powered intelligence firm turning information into accessible, actionable business knowledge. Artificial Intelligence is applied to millions of content-rich sources – from news media to global regulatory updates – driving insight and helping businesses manage the risks and opportunities they face.

Cohort 1

Seven companies were selected, alongside Nivaura, to join the first Fuse cohort:

Avvoka

A digital platform incorporating a contract creation, workflow and analytics tool.

Corlytics

A business providing regulatory risk intelligence, using forensic analysis and forecasting of fines and sentencing globally.

iManage

Previously known as RAVN, a business developing natural language processing and machine-learning technology to organise, discover and summarise documents.

Ithaca

A charitable not-for-profit enterprise aiming to create a mobile-responsive online technology platform to assist asylum seekers in gaining access to pro bono legal representation and advice.

Legatics

A company that turns ‘paper and email’ based legal processes into simple and innovative software.

Nivaura

Nivaura’s focus is on developing an automated and vertically integrated capital markets cloud-based service for the issuance and administration of financial instruments – a task involving significant financial, technical, regulatory and legal complexity.

Nivaura aims to offer a self-service platform solution for banks, exchanges, brokers, advisers and other intermediaries, to enable them to service their SME clients more cost effectively. This enables SMEs to access a robust source of financing and also allows larger placement agents/dealers to tap into an additional source of revenue by offering their services to companies/issuances that would normally be considered too small to manage cost effectively.

Whilst in the inaugural Fuse Cohort, Nivaura participated in the FCA sandboxes 2 and 3, issuing the world’s first fully automated cryptocurrency-denominated bond and the first structured product to be transacted and custodied, in each case, using blockchain. 

Opus 2 International

Originally a developer of litigation and transcript management software, they are now developing a tool to support lawyers with the prospect verification process.

Vable

A provider of content aggregation, automation and intelligence software.

I regularly visited Fuse in the first seat of my training contract and helped with the development of a document review tool for a large bank. The specialist screens were particularly useful in trialling the product, as well the support of the IT specialists that work there. It was obvious that a number of the products being developed in Fuse were going to change the way lawyers (and particularly trainees) work.

Robert Steele
Associate, Litigation

Opportunities

Create the change you want to see.

Your career isn’t a destination – it’s a journey. And just like any journey, the first steps can seem daunting but we will support you to find your way at every stage. Whether it’s attending an Open Day or starting a Training Contract, we offer a wide range of opportunities for you to learn about our firm, get valuable experience and start your career.