Corrs Chambers Westgarth spins out start-up called Telesto

"Internal legal functions are an area we think will be fairly attractive for this and also consulting companies that need to process large amounts of documents."

The creation of Telesto, which will also count Corrs director of legal technology solutions Brian Borskjaer as a director, comes on the back of Corrs Chambers Westgarth making a number of other investments in the start-up space, including taking a 50 per cent stake in the Asia Pacific operations of Canadian artificial intelligence company Beagle, which automates contract analysis.

Last year it also patented a cloud-based document reading technology called JustOCR, which analyses documents and gives them a quality rating, as well as identifying those with poor searchability. In 2016 it also formed a partnership with Melbourne University's Melbourne Accelerator Program (MAP), in a three-year deal, which involved a six-figure investment from the firm. It gave start-ups going through the accelerator access to free legal advice, clinics and new technology the firm was developing to help companies produce customised legal documents quickly.

Individual approaches

Mr do Rozario said Telesto was the next step of the transformation of document discovery, with things having changed greatly since the 1990s when young lawyers were still holed up in "darkened rooms" with thousands of pages of printed documents and post-it-notes.

"That changed in the 2000s and by 2005 e-discovery was an industry and most major law firms and consulting firms where in it in a deep way," he said.

"We recognised that there was a section of the market that didn't need to hire Corrs to help them with this work that's by-and-large IT processing rather than legal."

The investment in new technologies by Corrs is not unusual for the sector, with all the big firms making increasing forays into technology.

Gilbert+Tolbin has filed for a range of patents on new legal technologies and also has a stake in start-up LegalVision.

In the mid-2000s Mr do Rozario said every big law firm in Australia would have had the same strategy, but since a period of mergers and acquisitions in the sector, each firm has developed their own approaches.

"There's a big differentiation between those that merged overseas, in Australia or stayed independent," he said.

"One of our core mantras is we want to be a pioneering law firm. What that means practically is we're not afraid to try new ideas and invest in new technologies and processes."