Clifford Chance and Latham & Watkins will chair a consortium aimed at supporting the development of a new start-up that could facilitate innovation across law firms.

The collective surrounding Reynen Court, a start-up founded by Andrew Klein, a former associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, includes heavyweights such as Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, which is involved as vice chair, Linklaters, White & Case, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Ropes & Gray, Covington & Burling, Cravath Swaine & Moore, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, Orrick and Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom.

The start-up is working on a services automation platform to assist law firms in effectively deploying complex technological applications. By using common data systems and communication protocols, the company aims to smooth the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, smart contracts and other technology applications.

“There is a wide variety of new legal tech tools coming out every week, but they share a problem,” Paul Greenwood, CIO at Clifford Chance, told The Lawyer. “All of them are cloud-based and not connected to each other.”

Since these tools are based on a third-party cloud system, lawyers find themselves uploading important documents on storage that they feel is “unsecured”. The start-up wants to create a space that makes the implementation of new software easier through the setting of common standards, resulting in time and money savings.

The second problem faced by lawyers is the fragmented market of new tech providers. “This environment has tremendous potential but you can’t join all these vendors together,” Greenwood added. “You might miss the deadline because you have to opt for more traditional approaches and you don’t have a one-stop solution.”

The platform could offer law firms a single way to handle practices such as contract analysis, discovery, project management and compliance.

“As firms race to adopt new technologies, we wanted to enable them to take advantage of cloud-based computing technologies without the risk of having client content exposed,” said Klein, who recently obtained an initial founding round from Prins H LLC. “Firms will be able to bring their data into a protected environment and not to disparate third parties.”

The newly-formed consortium is not the only innovation-focused association backed by Clifford Chance. Last month, the firm also joined the Accord Project, a community initiative aimed at developing open source technology, smart contracts and blockchain applications.