From managing her boutique firm, Ms McLay understood firsthand the benefits technology can bring to a firm with fewer human resources. 

Ms McLay explained that her journey with legal tech tools began when she was litigating against opponents, who were much better resourced with teams of paralegals. This meant that getting hold of tech tools helped her complete time-consuming tasks in short time frames. 

“I got a bug for being able to try these tools.

“Once you start being able to use some of these tools, it opens your mind as to how much these tools can help,” she explained. 

According to Ms McLay, using such tools doesn’t actually detract from important aspects of legal work: “It doesn’t take away any of the intellectual challenge.”

“There is still lots of skill and judgement that has to be applied, but it can just take some of that manual load,” she noted.

“The pace of regulation has also grown up,” she noted. “I think we need to make use of the tools to help us cope with that increasing speed and increasing complexity.”

VIEW ALL

Ms McLay discussed how she sees the uptake of technology across firms from her experience of speaking with people across both large and small firms.

“Generally, there is a lot of under-utilisation of software functionality, even where the tools are available,” she highlighted.

“That’s not specific to legal,” she said, “but I think there are certain legal personality types that can make that be quite a common thing”.

“One feature that I think is part of the explanation in legal is that we’ve had a lot of legal practice-specific software [that] perhaps hasn’t had the easiest user interfaces,” she suggested. “It’s been a bit clunky to use.” 

“For a long while, it was a very sensible decision to not know how to make the computer work because if you did that, then you would be spending your days fixing other people’s documents,” she added. 

Ms McLay delved further into what might be driving technophobia in the legal profession.

“There is a tendency that we like to understand what we’re doing. We need to be right,” she noted. 

“There are very serious risks if we rely on a system that we don’t understand and it produces an error. 

“I think sometimes technophobia is the thought: ‘if I control everything, I know that it’s right. If I’m relying on an automated or a computerised system that I don’t understand, then I can’t be certain that it’s accurate, and that’s too big a risk for me’. 

“I think that’s one thing that can be driving some technophobia,” she explained.

“It can also be just not being exposed to the tools.” 

“You are so busy going on your day-to-day, on the phone, on the email, don’t really have time to test and play with some of these tools — things that we’re not familiar with and we don’t understand can be challenging,” she said.

Ms McLay continued unpacking the reasons why lawyers are experiencing technophobia.

“I also hear a lot of people say, ‘I didn’t come into law to be a robot. I like people. I want to talk to my clients. I want to be having that interaction with people. I don’t want to just be typing things into a screen’,” she recounted. 

“I don’t see that getting to grips with tech tools wipes that out.”  

“What I think tech can do is get rid of some of the back-end stuff so that you’re processing this overwhelming amount of data, and you can really be concentrating on the high-value work. 

“That can be communication, exercising the skill of judgement, coming up with novel arguments — all of those things are intrinsically human and are going to be increasingly important for lawyers to have as skills. 

“I think that that should be enhanced by the tech tools where they can help,” stated Ms McLay.