A book that Professor Richard Susskind describes as “a goldmine of practical guidance, written by a strong triumvirate of well-credentialed experts,” will be out soon, gaining glowing praise from senior leaders across the legal profession.
Law Reinvented: Leading AI Transformation in Legal Practice is the work of Adam Curphey, director of innovation at Macfarlanes; Oz Benamram, former chief knowledge officer at Simpson Thacher and White & Case; and Rebecca Pasternak, manager of practice innovation at White & Case, who previously worked with Curphey at Mayer Brown. All three are part of the SKILLS knowledge management community.
The book looks at what is changing in the legal profession (spoiler alert – everything) and provides insights and suggestions with regard to strategic considerations (including pricing and revenue); building a team; data; adoption; picking the right tools; risk; lawyer-built solutions (and shadow AI); and the human side of all of this – working together and keeping up.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Benamram said that one of the key takeaways from the book is that there is no ‘AI strategy’. “The AI strategy is part of your firm strategy,” he said. “It’s not a technology project. It’s really rethinking how you work. And it doesn’t happen on its own, it takes an army for a firm to be able to be successful.”
Pasternak agrees, adding that the law firm model regularly sees partners and a multitude of C-Suite executives trying to drive a strategy, commenting: “If it’s not in alignment with the business model of a law firm, you see diverging initiatives and objectives.”
What the AI strategy should be is particular to each firm and Curphey says: “You have firms that are set up to do high volume, low value work and others that are very specialist and what AI means and how that affects their strategy is going to be different for all of them. But what we do in the book is give people at the end of each chapter questions to ask yourself about the chapter and things to reckon with on your own about what you need to rethink. How might you start mapping some of this out and start applying it to your own organisation? It’s both practical thinking and an overview of the landscape.”
The book is intended to help law firms, in-house legal teams and the legal tech vendor community, with a chapter at the end setting out how all three should work together. Benamram says: “We think that’s the new norm. There is no more bilateral relationship, it’s all three – the triangular relationship will be the new norm.”
The three authors wrote the book through meetings and discussions and based on those conversations, used Claude to help create the first draft. The draft was then heavily edited, and Curphey observes that the amount of work should not be underestimated but that “we used AI in the way that we’d expect practitioners to use it.”
Asked for one thing from the book that will blow people away, Benamram says it’s the anecdotes derived from hard experience. The book details a time that he didn’t take advice on hiring into competing roles. “I created a war that shouldn’t have happened,” he said.
For Pasternak, the most important takeaway is that where lawyers have had to be legally competent, they now also need to competent in technology, observing: “They need to be fully familiar with the frontier market in this technology and what is available from a legal tech solution so that they can speak to the capabilities of what this technology can do. So that might mean experimenting on the weekends or after hours. Of course, not with client data, but maybe dummy documents, just so they know the full capabilities.”
For Curphey, finally, one of the biggest takeaways from the book is that doing nothing isn’t the lack of an option, it’s a choice that you have made. “To bury your head in the sand isn’t just waiting any more,” he says. “It’s an active decision not to start.”
You can preorder the book here: https://law-reinvented.com/
You can also read the feedback from other legal leaders including Clifford Chance’s CIO Paul Greenwood.
