Travers Smith LLP is delighted that its Dispute Resolution team has been awarded "Innovation in Disputes" and its Legal Technology and AI team has won "Innovation in Digital Solutions" at the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers Europe Awards 2023. Additionally, Travers Smith was ranked as the 12^th "Most Innovative Law Firm in Europe".

The annual FT Innovative Lawyer Europe Awards celebrate law firms, clients, in-house legal teams and legal service providers who are passionate about driving innovation in the legal sector. This year's awards received 551 submissions and nominations were received from 112 law firms and 87 in-house legal teams.

The "Innovation in Disputes" award recognises the Travers Smith team for its representation of Hewlett-Packard companies ("HP") in the widely-reported US$5bn "tech trial of the century" arising out of HP's acquisition of Autonomy, a FTSE100 software company. The Travers Smith team was led by Partner Toby Robinson. The team have previously won " Commercial Litigation Team of the Year" at the Legal Business Awards and " Litigation and Dispute Resolution Team of the Year" at the British Legal Awards for its work on the same case.

The "Innovation in Digital Solutions" award recognises the firm's Legal Technology and AI team, led by Oliver Bethell and Shawn Curran, for their open source project, YCNBot (Your Company Name e.g. TSBot). Launched in May 2023, in collaboration with 273 Ventures, YCNBot allows organisations to deploy ChatGPT, and its underlying capability, in a safer way. Travers Smith has continued to build in further safeguards as the technology continues to evolve – this has included enhanced privacy, the ability to submit feedback, the ability to share with a "Community" view and an analytics view for administrative users.

In addition, Competition Partner Stephen Whitfield was listed as a "commended individual" for his work advising London-based private equity firm Epiris on its purchase of Sepura, which itself was ranked as "Standout" in the "Practice of Law – Best examples of Legal work - Private Capital".

The firm was also "highly commended" in the "Skills Development" category for its ESG and Sustainable Finance Academy, an internal training programme launched earlier this year, in collaboration with faculty members at the Saïd Business School, to embed a deeper understanding across the firm of how ESG and sustainability issues affect clients' businesses.

Edmund Reed, Managing Partner, commented:

"I am delighted that we have been recognised in these highly competitive awards as one of the most innovative law firms in Europe for the ground breaking work we are doing in finding new solutions to help our clients achieve their commercial goals.

"Generative AI was a key focus in the FT's Special Report and there is no doubt it is here to stay and will play a critical role in our industry in years to come. The work our Legal Technology team has done to date has allowed us to interact with this technology in a secure way for learning purposes – and we have shared this with clients and the wider market. But we will not be standing still and I am looking forward to seeing the next steps from the team.

"Congratulations to all the teams involved!"