Yet with greater connectivity has come greater risk. How are law firms balancing the rapid pace of tech advancement with the need to protect their practices?

Lawyers Weekly, with the support of Excite IT, brought together some of the industry’s best-known IT experts to discuss how technology is creating opportunities, challenging traditional models and changing how lawyers practice.

Panel members:

PC: Peter Campbell, CIO/knowledge director, Sparke Helmore

GC: Garry Clarke, technology and IT director, Clayton Utz

SB: Scott Baxter, IT director, Piper Alderman

MK: Marwan Kojok, principal, Baybridge Lawyers

GA: Gary Adler, CIO, Minter Ellison

BS: Bryan Saba, managing director, Excite IT

CR: Christopher Rodrigues marketing manager, A/NZ, Check Point Software Technologies

PT: Phillip Tarrant, managing editor, Lawyers Weekly

PT: How are lawyers using technology in law firms today?

PC: Firstly lawyers work with a lot of information so they need some form of document-management system. They also need a billing system and an email system. You can’t create a law firm without those three things.

Then lawyers have to be able to store the documents properly. They’ve got to control them, they’ve got to secure them and they’ve got to make them available where they need them, so that brings us to document management.

The next layer is technology that can improve the efficiency of their service delivery. That’s where things like automation of parts of the process come in. Some practice areas can take automation to the next level and use it to help with case management.

Then the last layer on top is technology that makes the information visible to the clients through the delivery of that information over the web via a dedicated system.

PT: The introduction of email created a fundamental shift in how lawyers work. Has there been anything subsequent to email that has created a similar fundamental change?

MK: We can’t overemphasise how important email has become in the legal industry. With the efficiencies you can get now with Outlook and having templates within Outlook and integration with document-management systems, partners are less likely now to pick up a tape recorder and dictate things.

GC: I don’t think anything has fundamentally changed the way that lawyers work. The profession of law and the work that they do has stayed the same, it’s just the tools they use that have changed.

Rather than technology changing the practice of law itself, it’s the services around it that have become automated and helped make it more efficient.

GA: I think we’re on the cusp of a step change at the moment in terms of efficiency. It feels like for the first time technology has gone from something very back-end focused, to now being the true enabler of the business and it’s really about the efficiency of workflows.

We’re starting to see lots of great technologies that bring all of the various pieces together. It has become a big talking point in the industry, and we’re now actually starting to see some tangible outputs, particularly with some vendors who are legal industry specific.

PT: How are you dealing with the generational shift as younger lawyers bring new tech knowledge to the firm?

GA: The younger lawyers are almost like their own IT shop now. They bring so much savviness to the business that they’re often training some of the older, more senior partners on new technologies. I think it’s exciting. It’s actually about partnering with them to make sure that we get the best possible outcome.

SB: Young lawyers add great value and a lot of the time they can drive change within their teams. We use them as the champions – if you can get them on board with an idea, they can get it across to the rest of the team.

PC: We’re able to leverage young people so much more than we’ve been able to in the past.

I’m even finding that senior associates understand now that the outside world is changing and they need to make their practices more efficient. They also understand now that they need to know more about technology. Even though they’re not as tech savvy as some of the new grads coming in, they’re actually starting to drive the change.

There are still some partners that will sit in their office and won’t learn an awful lot about new technology, but they’re cajoled along by just about everybody else.

BS: The complaints coming from Gen Z are about technology deficiencies in terms of automation and keeping up to date with what’s available in the market. These guys coming up through the ranks are tech savvy, so it is important to offer these services to be an employer of choice, aside from the benefits of cost saving and so forth in an organisation.

PT: What is driving the change in law firms’ use of technology?

BS: In the 1980s and 1990s and even early 2000s, the availability of IT was the dictator of technology. I think we’re at the cusp of a change where the business and the clients now dictate how technology is going to be used and how it’s implemented.

PC: Another dynamic creating demand is that 10 or 15 years ago, people either didn’t have a PC in the home or it wasn’t very good – the one you had at work was much better. Now you’ve got a smartphone that’s better than anything you’ve got at work and your PCs at home are always up to date.

People are used to using those tools freely in their home context and they want that at work too. However, law firms have to have better information governance to protect our clients’ information so that entails some restrictions. The legal IT vendors have got a long way to go to get to the point where we are agile and able to keep up and still retain that control. I’m not quite sure how to crack that yet.

GA: It’s that double-edged sword of consumerisation. On the one hand the people want what they have at home but we need to focus on a continuum of risk versus convenience. Firms probably tend to lean more to the risk side, whereas I think in your home people lean more towards the convenience side.

CR: We all want to adopt technology, we want to make ourselves more efficient, but we need to think about where data protection sits in this piece.

Obviously you have two schools of people: you’ve got the younger generation who know how to use technology, but perhaps aren’t as cyber security savvy, and then you’ve got the older generation who don’t know how to use technology that well.

GA: Lawyers are risk-averse by their nature so it’s actually quite easy to sell risk over convenience. I am perhaps seeing with some of the younger generations less of an appreciation for that but usually they think risk first, convenience second.

Cyber security is such a hot topic but I’m not sure the appreciation is there. In fact, there’s sometimes more of an appreciation for the security of their personal information – they assume that someone else is looking after it at work.

MK: It’s a lot different in my opinion [as a boutique], only because we need to be far more competitive to stay in line with the market. We’re also competing with a lot of these smaller players who are running legal practices online where there’s no face-to-face interaction and there’s rarely even a telephone conversation. It’s all done online and outsourced.

We have to be far more flexible and, I guess, less risk-averse in respect to technology.

PT: How do law firms protect themselves from IT crises?

GA: We do our best to give our employees all the flexibility they need but still with a bit of lacquer around it to protect it.

The other thing is the concept of the human firewall. We’ve got all the fantastic technologies in place and they’re pretty robust but every single person is responsible for security as well. It’s actually about changing the mindset – if you want more flexibility, you’ve got to think about yourself as a human firewall.

CR: A lot of the time the danger is ‘fat finger syndrome’, where you’ve pressed the wrong button or turned the wrong switch off. I think it’s down to educating people and raising awareness. You need to have a plan in place to prevent things from happening and also a plan in place as to how you will deal with it if something does happen.

PC: You have to engineer your systems around the view that you will get breached at some point and have processes in place to contain the breach, deal with it and rectify it. We couldn’t buy any technology that would completely stop it from happening.

CR: What we’re seeing, not just in Australia but globally, is a lot of the law firms take all these efforts to try and stay safe but a lot of the issues come from the outside. What that means is it could be a customer or a client’s device that’s compromised, so the breach comes in through them without being detected. That’s where we’re seeing a lot of things like phishing and malware attacks, and that is where a lot of the risk lies.

PT: In terms of automation, where’s the line between efficiency and the value that a lawyer provides?

GC: There are particular parts of law that you can automate and there are others that you just can’t.

BS: There’s a lot more that could be automated than what you necessarily would automate. But there are a lot of aspects to a business that require an emotional touch point, where it does require some sort of human behaviour, such as interacting directly with a client or colleague to get some sort of critical decision made.

Automation is moving beyond just a workflow within a business – the industry is using it for mindful automation. What that means is looking at big data, which is more data than what we know what to do with. Mindful automation takes on the cognitive thinking or thought processes of a human and looks at the end objective, then starts to pull that back to work out how we’re going to get there.

Technology won’t necessarily make the decision but will bring across all the information necessary to make a decision. But there’s still that human emotional piece that will still be required to make that decision in the end.

PT: Are lawyers embracing automation or pushing it away?

BS: There are a couple of parts to this and it depends on which generation you’re talking to. For Gen Y and Gen X, they see the value as long as they can see where their time will be alternatively invested.

With Gen Z, they’re quite adoptive to it and are even forthcoming in terms of wanting to automate things. They’re coming forward with other ideas as to areas that we haven’t tapped into yet or even thought about.

PC: It’s a wider discussion than automation. It’s not technology that’s changing the service. It’s that law firms are starting to adopt principles that their clients had already adopted. You’ve got to be careful because you don’t want to be too focused on automation – you want to focus on improving the way they deliver legal services.

GA: Automation is a concept and it’s a hot term in the market. It’s really just about reinventing legal service delivery. Some partners ask me if they’re going to be replaced by a robot and the notion that I talk about with them is a teacher/student type analogy. The partner will continue to be teacher and the computer or the AI brain is the student. So we will always be there to teach the student, the student will ultimately make the partners’ lives easier and then all of a sudden it’s not such a scary concept.

PC: With AI, you think of it as intelligence but it’s not – it’s just brute force. With in-discovery, for example, it can search a million documents in a short time. That would take one person 100 days. It’s not actually clever, it just seems clever because it’s found a way to do something much faster that a human can, but it doesn’t mean it’s replacing humans.

For me, it always comes back to deconstructing the process you’re trying to follow. Once you’ve deconstructed that big process, you’ll know that there are little bits inside it that would be best done by a human; there are bits that would be best outsourced to India or bits best done by our robot. The skills that our firm is trying to build are more around how to deconstruct the matters, which helps with project management and helps you drive more efficiencies.

GC: What’s driving the use of artificial intelligence is client demand for better value for their business and that translates to the partners coming to see us and asking for a better way to do something. It’s not AI that’s driving it; it’s the clients driving it. Sometimes AI is the best way to solve the problem.

If you can say to the client, “we’re giving you better value for money because we’re being more sophisticated in our technology use” – that’s what’s driving our world.

GA: The phase we’re in now is about working smarter and that’s through better legal service delivery. The AI piece is one of the many cogs in the machine to get that right but there is still, of course, a big human element.

PT: What keeps you awake at night when it comes to technology within the law and what are you doing about it?

BS: Two things really: reliability and security. As an IT vendor, it’s our job to provide the utmost level of technological reliability and security, but there are alternate ways for hackers to get in and there’s a lack of awareness in firms too, which makes it hard.

GA: A couple of things. One is keeping up with the pace of change in the context of servicing our clients in the best possible way. The second is cyber security. While there are great systems in place, the threat is relentless and it’s continuing to grow.

MK: I must say security is not a top five priority for me as a managing partner of a firm trying to grow the business. But what keeps me up at night is trying to stay ahead of what clients are thinking and what they’re expecting from a delivery point of view and trying to be ahead of that curve.

SB: There’s not one thing to focus on, it’s many things – that’s probably part of the challenge, to be honest. The main thing is probably looking at where you can add value. Also the rate of change at which things are evolving, and cyber security as well. Education is a big piece of it but it’s also about making sure we use the systems in the best way we can to protect our staff.

PC: Obviously cyber security. Our clients are much more concerned about it than they were two years ago too. I think the other piece is the pace of change. There’s so much opportunity there and so many things are changing and I don’t think the legal IT vendor ecosystems, the people who write the applications, have caught up yet.

That manifests itself in things such as lawyers not being able work in a mobile way because we can’t give them a secure enough way to be as flexible as we want them to be. The legal IT ecosystem isn’t helping us enough at this point.

CR: For me, obviously I’m looking at it from a different perspective. We find more of the time it’s the awareness and education that keeps us up at night. Obviously cyber security is important but it’s the human factor a lot of the time. If there was some education in there, some awareness in there, perhaps that human error won’t happen.

GC: Something we haven’t talked about that is a concern is the workplace of the future. Our premises are our biggest expense outside of our legal salaries and people are working in new ways – on the beach, overseas, at home, in the cafe, on the client’s premises. So providing that kind of flexibility and mobility and always on access, whether you’re working from your iPad, or your smartphone or from a home office, and providing that kind of flexible environment is important to us at the moment.