Innovation has become a business buzz word, as creative thinking and the generation of new ideas become key to competing effectively and responding to market challenges. While employing pioneering approaches to providing legal counsel is not new for Nixon Peabody, we are keenly focused on ensuring that innovation is a cornerstone of our services.
Firmwide commitment to innovation is evidenced by our being one of the only global law firms to have a partner in the role of Chief Innovation Officer. Herb Stevens is the firm’s chief architect in charge of advancing ideas. Leveraging our culture of teamwork and collaboration, we encourage the process of bringing ideas forward, build upon them, and develop them into beneficial client services. Our innovation initiative promotes entrepreneurial spirit, as everyone at Nixon Peabody contributes to creation of new services and client solutions.
Client partnership is essential to successful innovation. We maintain a dialogue with clients to understand which of their challenges they need us to help solve, and keep abreast of their markets and industries to bring forward new opportunities. For example, we advise the Affordable Housing industry on compounding tax credit financing opportunities by employing renewable energy solutions in financing and development. And our dealmakers were recognized for their innovative thinking when recognized by American Lawyer for uniting 11 energy entities behind transactions that are upgrading the Midwest power grid.
Decades of experience provide the foundation for Nixon Peabody’s innovation focus. Ours was one of the first law firms to open its doors to women and members of minority groups in the 1960s. The firm’s Affordable Housing practice attorneys were pioneering advocates for the inclusion of tax credits that support affordable housing development in the Tax Reform Act of 1986. This ultimately launched the tax credit syndication industry, in which Nixon Peabody has long been a national leader. In the 1970s, Nixon Peabody took a bold step in creating a subsidiary conference company to provide high-quality, accredited continuing education for professionals working in a variety of industries that the firm believed were under-served.
Today’s innovations include Nixon Peabody Project Management—making us one of the only AmLaw 100 firms that has trained hundreds of timekeepers on applying project management discipline to work with clients. Another innovation, NP Trial®, ensures that partners who are courtroom veterans and proven trial lawyers are participating on client cases being argued in the most challenging venues. Our Legally Green® and social benefit investing programs uniquely harmonize our practice and partnership commitments with sustainability and community. The firm’s NP Capital Connector program is an advancement beyond the usual ad hoc marrying of start-ups with investors, institutionalizing a cross-firm platform for entrepreneurial networking and financing.
We value and encourage inventive thinking, support and build upon each other’s ideas, and maintain constant communication with our clients to ensure that they are the focus of our innovations and voices in the creative process.