Tracey McDermott is chief technology officer at Pinsent Masons, who joined this year from McCarthy Stone, the UK’s leading development of retirement communities, and many years before that was CIO at BMI Healthcare. Her career history includes stints at PwC and BDO.
It’s always interesting to speak to people who are comparatively new to the legal sector and, reflecting on the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025, McDermott highlighted the lack of competition that we often see in the legal tech space and the opportunity for disruption, commenting: “I think that’s super exciting in terms of the opportunities that that new tech has to disrupt the perhaps more traditional solutions in in the sector.”
McDermott said that the focus of 2024 was “really around us focusing on matching the pace of AI advancement with the reality of what that looks like and feels like internally for product development and implementation, taking into consideration the implications on business change and anchoring those thoughts, innovations and investments in real client value. That’s a really big focus.”
Pinsents have split their GenAI exploration and use into camps: general productivity areas that they can leverage as an organisation in their operations, and specific use cases that they are building technology solutions around.
What’s interesting to McDermott about what’s coming down the track is the agentic AI capabilities being embedded in core tools and how to get real market differentiation combining tech with talent.
Make sure you listen to that conversation here.