The legal tech autumn conference season is truly upon us and if you missed Vis-a-Vis and/or London Law Expo, I’m here to help, because I attended both last week, as the dark circles under my eyes no doubt attest.
Very different animals, Vis-a-Vis was resurrected this year by BDO’s chief information officer Stuart Walters and Saffery’s IT director David Fazakerley, who are both in the accounting world. As a result, while the guest list was predominantly legal, there were a good number of accounting IT heads, making for some interesting comparisons between worlds.
A two-day offsite set in Windsor in the Southeast of England, Vis-a-Vis – last hosted in 2022 by a wider team – attracts a typically senior IT audience of CIOs and COOs. A Sunday evening arrival with drinks and dinner set the networking tone, with the event deliberately building in time for delegates to share ideas and the odd drink or two.
On the first night there was an after dinner talk from Daniel J Hulme, chief AI officer at WPP, which acquired his AI tech company Satalia in 2021 for a rumoured £75m. The beautiful high ceilinged dining room in Hotel de Vere Beaumont Estate was very echoey and from our table it was difficult to hear, but Walters did an excellent job of summarising the talk the following morning. Some of the key points from Hulme included:
- Don’t wait for your data to be ready – find a use case, and build on it
- When you’re building AI think:
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- What is the intent?
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- Is it explainable?
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- What if AI overachieves and outperforms humans?
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- This is not a bubble
- Think about building digital twins – do we replace the managing partner with AI?
The morning started with a thought-provoking discussion among tables around some of the implications of Hulme’s observations on our day-to-day businesses.
Interesting points from the tables included:
- GenAI adoption is very varied and also practice specific. Private wealth lawyers and clients don’t want to go near it. Corporate, for example, can see the value.
- There is a wide variation between firms in terms of senior partner adoption – in some firms, there is great reluctance. This may come down to the level of training and repetitive messaging around tone from the top. Some firms are starting their new tech training with partners.
- Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a key driver.
- Showing lawyers how AI is freeing up time for people using it is important.
- Clients are asking if firms have GenAI tech but that’s the wrong question – it should be whether they are using it.
- There’s potential to use AI to create, in effect, a digital GC to interact with and test ideas in advance.
- In terms of whether the legal or accounting sector are more advanced, where in the past technology has helped to speed up numbers, GenAI is good with language and words, and lawyers are and will begin to come into their own.
- Some people are strongly of the view that legal AI models are ‘coming to eat our lunch’ and that we are ‘handing it to them on a plate’.
Sadly I missed most of a panel discussion on ‘AI in the Wild’ with Stuart Whittle from Weightmans; Daniel Denton from Menzies; John Hunter from the Council of Europe; and Shawn Curran from Jylo but it was well-received. One panellist amusingly observed towards the end: “I wish we had listened to our KM colleagues 20 years ago!”
Up next was Rob O’Donohue, VP analyst and KI leader (executive leadership research) at Gartner, talking about the secret habits of high performing executives, which stems from research that Gartner conducted with a large number of C-Suite executives.
The book that inspired this research is the famous ‘The 7 habits of highly effective people’ but O’Donohue was only half joking when he said: “Seven habits is not enough now.” The pressure that we all feel just to keep up can lead to overwhelm and stress.
The secret to helping you to perform despite the pressures include:
- Be authentic – build a ‘vulnerability muscle’ that enables others to express themselves
- Be empathetic – you don’t have to solve everyone’s problems, just listen
- Build your relationships and social skills to connect and communicate\Build psychological safety
- Create a learning mindset where you can uncover blindspots and seek feedback from peers
- Embrace radical flexibility over when and where people work
- Block time in the diary for personal time/needs
- Integrate fun into the workplace
- Reward failure – saying you are ok with failure means nothing if it is still underpinned by fear of failure – destigmatise it.
There were some fabulous presentations through the day and what’s interesting is that much of it isn’t about ‘legal tech’. Leaders are still embracing strategies to help deliver change – which is as hard as it gets and can make the tech look easy.
London Law Expo
Turning to London Law Expo, hosted by Netlaw Media, this was a first for me. The company behind the British Legal Technology Forum hosts this conference in October across three stages: The Main Stage, this year hosted by Professor Stephen Mayson; The Tech Hub, hosted by Shawn Curran from Jylo; and The Operations Stage, hosted by Christina Blacklaws.
An exhibit hall featured around 25 vendors/exhibitors including Workday. I mention that because one of the most interesting sessions to me was a panel session with Workday’s regional sales director Ben Gordon; CMS head of HR service delivery Lisa Moore and CMS senior HR operations manager Steve Makin.
The trio discussed how CMS is the product of a three-way merger in 2017, and post-merger, the business team has had an opportunity to review how the firm operates from a business services perspective. Where was the data? How could they ensure the data is being used in the right way? Technology has been just one part.
The Workday project came in four phases, including testing and configuring the software. But Moore said: “The biggest part is communication.” Planning on the project took around a year. What’s interesting is that CMS is now bringing into Workday financial data such as pay benchmarking data in order to help run its pay reviews, meaning, the team says, no more spreadsheets. It looks like that we’ll see further integrations down the road.
There was a lot of good content at Law Expo but I’ll pick out one more session which is the keynote at the end of the day from Claire Williams, who ran the Williams racing car team and was the youngest-ever deputy team principal in motorsports.
Williams was a candid and engaging speaker who talked about how she ran the high performing business (not through nepotism, she stressed), but also how she pushed through a NextGen programme to support women in the workplace, following a raft of sometimes heartbreaking honest appraisals. “I had people say ‘this isn’t Williams, what is that crazy woman doing?!” Williams recalls of the response to the programme. “So those weren’t the people we needed. You have to put your team first and say ‘if you’re not prepared to come on this journey, perhaps this isn’t the right place for you.”
That’s all from me, apologies if you aren’t name checked here and if you were at the conference and saw something fabulous that you’d like me to include in an update, please email me on [email protected]