CALLUM SINCLAIR

A MERE six weeks after joining my new firm, Burness Paull, a colleague was faced with a near impossible task: to make the audience at the TEDx Glasgow Conference in Glasgow feel sorry for lawyers.

We live in incredibly interesting times. Most people now accept that we are living through a fourth revolution: a digital revolution. I’ve heard it said, and I agree, that the pace of change in technology has never been so fast, and will never be as slow again.

My colleague asked the TEDx audience: “How are lawyers responding in this new tech-enabled world?”

The answer is generally not very well. Law tends to be thought of as a traditional industry fond of dusty books and archaic customs; and lawyers as naturally analytical, cautious and conservative folk. Whilst the truth is very different in most cases, it is clear that the profession still has work to do.

PWC’s Law Firm Survey in 2015 found that 80% of lawyers stated they knew they needed to implement technology in their firm to stay relevant. But in a follow-up survey, only 23% of firms had actually made operational changes since the survey.

Before I bring my own profession into disrepute, I should point out that there is a lot of activity in this area being undertaken by progressive firms, including my own.

Many are adopting document automation, legal project management and other systems to improve the way they work and are beginning to explore artificial intelligence as a future enabler.

The need for change is clear – clients are now deploying tech throughout their own organisations and are seeing their supply chains do likewise. They will expect their lawyers to do likewise.

In-house counsel and other legal budget-holders are being encouraged to deliver “more for less”. And the next generation of millennial graduates will have instinctively grown up with technology and will expect their employers to leverage technology to improve productivity and the overall work experience.

Firms will need to strike a key balance. On the one hand, they will need to invest in “bigger bets” as their differentiator whilst being agile enough in order to “run to keep up” on the rest (that will be a real challenge for some of the big global firms, as well as SMEs).

On the other, they will need to ensure that service delivery and quality remains high, whilst appropriately managing risk, privacy and security.

And all the time they will be looking over their shoulder to make sure that newer entrants to the market (such as “newlaw” alternative business structures and large accounting firms) don’t come from leftfield and “eat their lunch”.

Of course, responding to these challenges is about more than technology. It is about a change in processes, culture and attitudes. It will involve a change in job roles too – we have just hired our first dedicated legal technologist for example. But technology itself has a key part to play.

Exactly one week after TEDx Glasgow, where my colleague finished by challenging the audience to talk to their lawyers about how they are using legal technology, I was sharing a stage with Richard Susskind OBE at our Partners’ Conference in Dundee. I have followed Richard, one of the leading thinkers on legal technology, since the 1980s. After a mind-expanding presentation to our partnership, he relayed an anecdote about how he was scoffed at by some in the profession when, 20 years ago, he suggested that lawyers would very soon be using email for almost all their communications...

All our clients are now technology companies whether they create, sell or are enabled by tech. We need to starting thinking and acting more like them if we are to maintain a leading market position, and I for one am looking forward to the journey!

Callum Sinclair is a partner and head of technology at Burness Paull