Cisilion’s Legal Roundtable

Last week we hosted our first Legal Roundtable at The Libertine’s private dining room with Kerry Angel, IT Director at Harbottle & Lewis. The discussion was centered around How IT can improve the profitability of firms with particular focus on AI, security, collaboration and hybrid working. The conversations we so thought provoking and it was great to see everyone contributing to create such a diverse discussion.

We started the conversation by discussing the future use of AI in the legal sector. One of the main points was who in the business should be adopting new technology and AI. Some participants saw that there was an appetite for improving their technology across the business as a whole and that it would greatly improve their firm’s efficiency. However, others explained that the focus on who should be adopting the new technology and AI is often directed at the wrong people. C-Level members of firms are more ‘set in their ways’ and struggle to see the benefits as already successful lawyers. The key would be to get the younger and more junior staff, as well as back-office staff, trained in and adopting the new technology and AI. This would start making the use of AI a habit and the benefits would create ‘FOMO’ within the business. The focus on back-office staff was so that the client facing lawyers could keep the focus on the human interaction aspect of the business which is so imperative to law firms.

The discussion also focused on the best areas of the business to use AI in. It was highlighted that personal productivity is the most important use for AI as they feel the attempt to use it for document drafting and legal processes was jumping ahead of the game and into uncomfortable territory. There was a desire to use it for onboarding processes to make it less tedious and long, however there were concerns with using AI when it came to client facing aspects of the business. One concern was having to review what the AI was producing to check it’s accuracy; another was that using AI would mean having to constantly ask the client for more information which would be annoying. The biggest concern was around security and more the point that there is lack of awareness / understanding of how to secure organisations Firms and clients themselves are scared around the security of client’s data when it comes to using AI.

On AI, there was discussion about the need to look at AI PCs/Copilot Plus PCs as we refresh devices to be ready for the wave of local SLM supported applications . These devices can take advantage of applications (new and coming soon) that use edge AI services. This next generation of apps, need next generation of devices in AI-PCs and Copilot Plus PCs.

The main takeaway when it came to the conversation around collaboration technologies was a similar ‘set in their ways’ mentality. The group were discussing the lack of use of collab documents like SharePoint etc, and that email is where they did everything. This was not because of anything else other than familiarity. This further highlight that the key to adopting new technologies is through the junior staff of the business.

There was a debate about office days versus working from home. One company considered requiring employees to be in the office five days a week, believing junior employees will benefit from face-to-face learning with partners. However, the struggle then lies with the partners no longer being keen on coming in regularly. Another company is trialling a complete remote work system, where remote workers are reporting higher happiness and no drop in productivity.

There seems to be no fixed answer on how to deal with this. There is clearly an impact on juniors and grads, but more senior and experienced lawyers are more than happy working remotely. We continue to see pushes to “back to office” but on the other end of the Spectrum we also see more rumours in legal about work anywhere, work anytime, work on your time.

The roundtable highlighted the need for younger and back-office staff to adopt new technology and AI, as C-level members are often resistant to change. It was highlighted that the benefits of tools like Copilot for personal productivity is under-rated and the value is huge, and we need to look at the huge value Copilot can provide for individual people as a “personal productivity tool or digital PA”. The discussion led to the fact that this value is faster to see and value often than using Copilot and/or agents for departmental use and for autonomous shared agents such as for legal document drafting or legal processes review with concerns (and generally mis understanding or ability to prove) security, GDPR, privacy and accuracy concerns.

The conversation continued and underscored the familiarity and use of extensive use of email in legal over modern collaborative tools like Teams, Co-Authoring in apps and SharePoint for example.

The debate centered on office versus remote work, with some companies seeing benefits in more face-to-face time (in office), especially to aid learning and mentoring for juniors, while others report higher happiness and unchanged productivity with complete remote work with some teams moving to full remote work for back-office functions. Some were looking at more “enforced”.