John Court is global director of IT at UK top 50 law firm HFW, where the focus of the year has been on readiness, preparation, and assessing where there is value in new technology.
The London-headquartered firm has a cloud-first strategy and, speaking to Legal IT Insider as part of our 2024/25 reflections, Court said: “We’ve made some real steps forward in terms of that journey into the cloud and some of our key technology. But also, it’s about looking to the future and thinking about ‘how do we need to be ready with our infrastructure, with our data and with our applications?’ and obviously leading into artificial intelligence at the right time.”
A key focus of the year has been in rationalising HFW’s supply chain and data centres, with a lot of work going on that behind the scenes.
In terms of AI readiness, HFW has an AI policy and Court said: “It’s all well and good having a policy but then you need to make sure you communicate it and that people understand what you’re asking them to do, plus what it means for them and why they need to think about those things. That has been an important exercise.”
FOMO is real for all firms and Court says: “Yes, we get questions about ‘Why haven’t we got the latest tools?’ and that is an opportunity to say ‘What is it that you’re trying to achieve? What’s the outcome you’re looking for?’ And then you have that conversation rather than saying, ‘Ok here’s the latest, greatest tool.”