Tony McKenna was appointed president of the International Legal Technology Association in 2023 and has been director of IT and change at UK top 100 law firm Howard Kennedy since June 2020.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider at the close of the year, McKenna says 2024 was very much a year of two halves. “There was a lot of hype in 2023 and then it all started to slow down in the early part of 2024, where we were hoping to get access to things like Copilot and look at what other providers were bringing into their platforms in terms of Gen,” he says.
In fact, Microsoft relaxed their licensing laws around Copilot in the Spring and things have been slower to progress than law firm tech leaders perhaps expected.
“The challenge with things like Copilot and the large language model story is use cases,” McKenna says. “Everybody’s really trying to work out what the use case is, and through the course of the year there has been a lot of focus on that.”
At ILTACON Europe, Microsoft presented on Copilot use cases, and McKenna says: “That was great and with the introduction of things like Jylo into the mix and Harvey into the mix there’s room for everybody to play now.”
In 2025, McKenna predicts there will be a significant focus on data; disaster recovery; integrating AI into existing platforms; and looking towards a more Microsoft-centric DMS world.