ILTA’s European conference once again took place in mid-November at Allen & Overy’s London office, featuring a half-day Microsoft Copilot Masterclass and talks from psychologists, and AI and data experts. The Microsoft session was closed to the press at Microsoft’s request, but as part of our end-of-year reflections, we can share with you some in-depth insights from this important session as well as highlights from the diverse range of other talks at the conference.
Microsoft was a big draw for many delegates, and Damien Behan, IT director at Scottish law firm Brodies and co-chair of ILTACON Europe told Legal IT Insider: “The Microsoft Copilot Masterclass was a chance for attendees to see a live demo of Copilot from Microsofties who have been using it day-to-day for months. As such, it was also a chance to get their views on the reality of implementing this generative AI technology on your firm’s 365 environment, both in terms of the better use cases, and what firms need to watch out for.”
Liz Leigh-Bowler, director of modern work business group at Microsoft kicked off the session by talking attendees through the results of the recent Microsoft Work Trend Index 2023 (Work Trend Index: Microsoft’s latest research on the ways we work), which revealed that employees spend 57% of their time communicating rather than creating. There are too many meetings, too much searching for information and not enough focus time. While 49% of people say they are worried AI will replace their jobs, 70% would ‘delegate as much work as possible to AI to lessen their workloads’.
Behan says: “It was against this backdrop that Microsoft presented Copilot as an assistant to help to reduce the amount of time we spend on emails, meetings and locating information. Their strapline for this was that Copilot would “Unlock productivity and unleash creativity.”
The Microsoft speakers at ILTA were Paul Barlow, technology strategist for the legal industry at Microsoft, and Richard Barrett, a Microsoft 365 specialist at Microsoft. A key point that Microsoft stressed, Behan says, was that Copilot is an assistant, and that there is always a ‘human in the loop.’ “The user determines, guides and approves the output of the AI – it doesn’t do your job for you, but it helps you to do it,” Behan said. “You decide whether to accept its suggestions; for example, if it drafts an email for you, it doesn’t send it and you review it before hitting Send. Another takeaway was that the more you input the better the output – the value of the tool increases with complexity.”
Behan says that Microsoft were keen to stress that this is ‘AI you can trust’, commenting: “They talked about their responsible AI principles of fairness, reliability & safety, privacy & security, inclusiveness, transparency and accountability. Microsoft stressed that their AI is one of the safest with strict boundaries enforced. Probably most important of all for delegates was the point that ‘your data is your data’ and that it wouldn’t be used to train the OpenAI foundation models without permission. Your data never leaves the logical boundaries of your 365 tenant and Copilot respects the permissions of the apps so that data cannot leak between users and groups.”
Behan adds: “Data residency is another key concern for firms and Microsoft said that ‘where possible’ it would use UK data centres, but for capacity reasons it may have to use other data centres, but it will only do this in memory with no data stored.”
Attendees were also given a helpful explanation of how Copilot interacts with the large language model and Behan said: “Copilot doesn’t just use the LLM but also your firm’s 365 data and apps and the internet to provide assistance. When a user prompts Copilot, it accesses the Microsoft Graph and Semantic Index for your organisation and carries out pre-processing, before then sending a modified prompt to the LLM, then takes the response from the LLM and carries out post-processing against the Graph and Semantic Index, before sending the response to the user. In this way the prompt and response are ‘grounded’ in your data and context (your emails, files, meetings, chats, calendars and contacts).”
There was some good news for delegates about the technical requirements for Copilot: Microsoft said they were aware that for many firms, using New Outlook wasn’t an option, as law firms typically use 3rd party Outlook COM add-ins, which New Outlook doesn’t support. In Q1 2024, Copilot will be released for “Classic Outlook”. Interestingly, Microsoft said they are also working on connectors to other systems, such as document management. Behan said: “One point that the panel emphasised was that you need to be on the monthly Enterprise release channel to take advantage of Copilot. While many firms favour the certainty of the semi-annual channel, those that had had been nervous of potential disruption caused by monthly updates were apparently surprised at how smooth it had been.”
The actual demo of Copilot and discussion of the use cases for the system was the bit that the audience was waiting for. “We were shown automated email chain summaries and reply drafting in Outlook, with coaching on tone, clarity and sentiment,” says Behan. “I particularly like the idea of Copilot advising you when you need to tone down your language or be clearer. We also saw 365 chat being used for general queries and use cases such taking a job spec and a CV and asking it to identify gaps and strength of fit.
“In Excel we heard that it could take a security questionnaire and answer it based on a list of previous similar answers, something that would save security and compliance teams a lot of time. Overall, the pitch was that Copilot would support both legal and business services colleagues, helping them to reduce time on non-billable admin, quickly produce attendance notes and summaries of interactions, boost document product efficiency as well as helping IT, HR and BD teams with process efficiency.”
Time savings would come from helping users to quickly catch-up on developments and discussions, review agree and identify actions for meetings, query documents for relevant information, generate draft briefing notes/minutes and summarise long email threads and documents. Another less obvious but important point was how Copilot would assist with inclusion, by making text production accessible for those that find writing more difficult, or helping those who are writing in a non-native language. Copilot currently supports 12 languages with more to come.
“What I found useful was the guidance Microsoft gave about how to use Copilot,” says Behan. “Prompting, unsurprisingly, is very important – users need to ask the right questions to get the best outputs. But it’s not all about training users upfront, we should let people know about its capabilities and then let them explore the system. Organisations were advised not to second guess use cases upfront and as they would find users coming up with ideas they hadn’t even considered. Copilot labs will show administrators the most popular prompts, which can help with identifying use cases and disseminating these to others, and further stats and calculators would be made available to assist.”
In terms of the risks, Behan says that other than the data residency point above, data access was a key point covered, commenting: “It was made clear that if you have access to data in 365 then so will your Copilot. There is information stored there that firms don’t necessarily know about – i.e., files uploaded into Teams. Copilot will respect the security model, but it may uncover content a firm didn’t realise was available to all users. They recommended creating a heat map of your 365 data, checking settings and auditing that data before switching on Copilot, and tips such as ensuring that when a new Team is created in Teams that it is private.”
The session rounded off with a discussion on licensing and pricing, with observations from the floor that it was not cheap, and that combined with the minimum 300 subscription threshold, this could be seen to be discriminating against smaller firms.
Behan says that one big question is whether this will create a two-tier system where larger firms with deeper pockets would have a competitive advantage over firms with lower headcount. “Microsoft answered this by referencing the cost of providing generative AI solutions and alluded to the current limitations being something that would be reviewed in the future, providing hope for firms without the scale to justify investing in so many subscriptions,” he said.
Feedback from the Microsoft session was good, and, while a conversation for another time, we would urge that press are not excluded from valuable learning sessions like this.
Also speaking on day one of ILTACON Europe was chartered psychologist Rob Archer, who specialises in helping organisation’s to build resilience, high performance, and improve mental health. Andrew Powell, CIO of Macfarlanes, who is a member of ILTA’s International Programming Team and a past-chair of ILTACON Europe said: “Rob’s talk was along the lines of ‘high performing teams can’t operate at 100% all the time,’ and that’s the sort of thing that IT and cybersecurity teams aren’t good at; thinking about how you have rest periods between the peaks without feeling guilty.
“Rob’s session was pretty interactive, and it was clear that most of the audience were of the view that from lockdown onwards, it has been pretty relentless, and that’s interesting because I wondered if that was just me. Rob gave a lot of different solutions, but the key tip was ‘go and get daylight, however it happens.’ That can either be near the window during the day for 20 minutes, or better still go outside. The single thing that made a difference to wellbeing was being exposed to enough daylight during the day, and if you’re commuting in darkness in winter, you don’t get that.”
Day two of ILTACON Europe brought a broad set of presentations. ILTA’s president Tony McKenna, who is director of IT and change at UK top 100 law firm Howard Kennedy, told Legal IT Insider: “The who point of day two was that if IT people are accountable for change, they need to understand what technology is doing in the wider context of the industry. For me it was great to get that broader understanding, so that when you’re having those executive conversations, you’re aware of wider industry norms.”
Conference co-chair Karen Jacks, who is chief technology officer at Bird & Bird, added: “Finally a legal tech event can be more than, well, legal tech!”
Conferences highlights included a talk by psychologist and performance coach Jamil Qureshi. Powell said: “Jamil was talking about thinking and acting being linked, and that in order to behave differently, you have to think differently, otherwise it’s a one-off change and you revert back to type. That’s interesting in terms of your own actions and how you deliver change within a firm. Don’t just expect people to embrace change – go a step back and help people understand why they might want to do things differently, so take behaviour all the way back and try to influence their thoughts, not just their actions.”
Powells says that another brilliant presentation was Matt Watts from NetApp, who talked about sustainability. “He showed the huge amount of data that we create and never look at again, and the environmental cost of that. Did you know that 18% of Ireland’s electricity goes on powering the big three data centre providers? For me that reinforces what we have been doing already from a GDPR perspective and not keeping stuff (email, backups, file stores) indefinitely – there is a clear environmental reason not to.”
The last session of day two was Nina Schick, author, entrepreneur and AI expert, and McKenna said: “Nina’s talk at the end talked about the whole deep fake aspect of things to come. How do we combat voice and video fakes and spear phishing attacks where someone mimics the voice of your chief executive and asks you to do something? We need to get our thinking caps on and it’s something that I have already addressed with my executives. It still feels like something from Tomorrow’s World but it’s real and culturally challenging – we are currently accepting that if it sounds like Tony, it is Tony.”
ILTACON Europe is a radically smaller affair than its US counterpart, but it attracts CIOs and senior IT decision makers from across Europe, as well as a few from North America. Many come for the networking. Francesc Muñoz, CIO of Iberian giant Cuatrecasas, told Legal IT Insider that his priority was “to chat and share with peers about legal tech, gen AI and all the hot stuff.” A key draw for Muñoz was also to have access to the Microsoft executives and understand more about Copilot.
Some of the attendees, particularly on the vendor side, were not as convinced by the generalist sessions, and would have preferred a more technology heavy conference. As ILTACON Europe grows, it would be useful to consider whether it should adopt breakout sessions to provide more choice in content.
However, Powell says: “In the closing comments, I asked delegates to give me their thoughts about the event format and content. Their feedback was excellent, including from people who had not been for several years but thought ‘what a difference.’ We had a waiting list – when does that ever happen?! We tried to build a conference that helped delegates deal with the stuff that comes up in their jobs, but was not solely technology focused. A lot of the content was about people and was just as relevant to different functions –marketing, HR, COO or whoever.”
Jacks says: “We have lots of food for thought for next year and we’re already discussing potential speakers and formats. A mix of speakers and topics was so popular that we’ll definitely be looking at that again for next year.”