Episode 17 - Alex Hutchinson

[00:00:00] So, after a brief hiatus, I’ve come back with a difficult second album of the

[00:00:05] Your Law Firm Success Podcast. And surprisingly enough, we’re giving it a strong focus on AI, but not on not in

[00:00:13] the way that we see at conferences and events and talks and sales materials.

[00:00:20] It’s really about how you can begin to separate the wheat from the chaff as a law firm owner or a law firm leader or

[00:00:27] as a law firm partner. looking at how you can begin to deploy AI within your

[00:00:32] practice. For many, it’s become a almost like stage fright where you’re

[00:00:37] confronted with so much that it’s difficult to make a decision. So, in my first

[00:00:44] episode of this new season, I brought in Alex Hutcherson. I really like Alex Hutchson as a typical

[00:00:51] man or or person from Northern England. He’s straightforward, easy to deal with, and pragmatic. And

[00:00:58] his job is largely helping law firms look at the best ways in which they can deploy it to their benefit to increase

[00:01:06] efficiency, maximise productivity, and reduce roadblocks or obstacles. I’ve

[00:01:14] got my dog with me in again today for this. H she was there for the first one of the last series. In this episode,

[00:01:20] what we do is we speak to Alex and we say, we ask him, “Where do you start?

[00:01:26] Where do you begin? And how do you get started? How do you begin taking your firm down this journey that we now know

[00:01:34] we’re all on?” Thank you very much, Alex, for coming in. You’re the first guest of season 2. How does that feel?

[00:01:40] I’m honoured. Honoured to be here. Season two. Yeah. The reason that I wanted to speak to you is because and after a

[00:01:47] sort of hiatus in this, there’s one subject that’s on everybody’s mind and that’s,

[00:01:56] you know, how we’re going to live on Mars or more likely in the legal sector, the use of AI.

[00:02:03] And for one, you know, I despite being a big user of AI in our workplace and a

[00:02:10] fan of what it can bring from an efficiency and skills point of view, have been absolutely overwhelmed and

[00:02:15] overwhelmed by its use in conferences, events,

[00:02:23] the delegate lists and also what you call them the exhibition areas where

[00:02:29] vendors and sponsors are. you know, it’s a complete overwhelm. And what I wanted to do was to bring in

[00:02:37] an expert who works with law firms around the country helping them to understand how they can deploy

[00:02:43] technology to their benefit with a view to offering some guidance as

[00:02:48] to how law firms can begin. a lot of firms of all shapes and sizes who don’t have the type of resource

[00:02:55] that the bigger firms might have can begin to understand how and where they

[00:03:01] can implement AI into their practice. That was meant to be an introduction. It

[00:03:06] was a bit of a large monologue. So maybe you could just tell us initially just a brief introduction into you and your

[00:03:11] business. Yeah, sure. So I operate as a fractional CTO basically or independent

[00:03:18] IT leadership for boutique law firms. So we’re typically dealing with firms that are over half a million revenue under

[00:03:26] 250 headcounts. They don’t need a full-time IT director, fractional CTO,

[00:03:31] anything on the payroll, but tech’s getting in the way. Tech can mean it systems, software, suppliers, security.

[00:03:39] They’ve had enough. something’s preventing them from doing what they need to do or be where they need to be and they want to bring in some help on a

[00:03:46] temporary basis. That’s basically what we do. I provide that leadership and then there’s certain types of

[00:03:51] projects that that typically would be. How do these problems initially

[00:03:58] manifest themselves for our firms? Like if you were to outline maybe the top three or four issues that firms maybe

[00:04:04] come. some are kind of legacy issues where you’ve started a firm, you know, you were small, you’ve acquired

[00:04:11] bits of technology and software and systems and that works to a degree, but then eventually as you grow in

[00:04:17] headcount, they start creaking and it’s not just law firms like any business

[00:04:22] owner would do. You don’t want to go out your way to make these changes because it’s not easy to do. They know that.

[00:04:28] They don’t know what new technology to pick. They don’t really want to get involved in doing it. So they keep going

[00:04:34] as long as they can and eventually something happens. Something happens where it becomes disruptive. Either a

[00:04:40] lot of the things that spring to mind when I talk about legacy is you’ll have a piece of software that sits on a

[00:04:46] server but everything now is built in the cloud. So these two things don’t talk and it’s getting stretched all the time. So it starts to actually disrupt

[00:04:53] the firm and that’s when they need to make a change. Or case management providers said you know you’re no longer

[00:04:59] on that model. You’re now software as a service. It’s 45 a month. You need to

[00:05:04] move to this one. You’re not doing it. It’s 90 pounds a month. You know, there’s the environment forces it. Whether it’s the internal

[00:05:10] environment or the external environment, okay? Or there’s just a trust thing. You know, we’ve got downtime and disruption. We

[00:05:16] can’t log in or this is going down all the time. We’ve told the IT provider to fix it. They’ve told us they’ve done it

[00:05:22] five times and every time it keeps coming back, I’ve had enough, you know, and that’s when they need somebody independent to just come in and

[00:05:28] understand it and take care of it. And how do they normally find you? Are you introduced or is this online or

[00:05:34] LinkedIn? Because you’re quite active on LinkedIn. Yeah, I I am active on LinkedIn. I think what I’ve realised now is that that I

[00:05:40] like doing it. I do like doing it. You need to be careful you don’t do too much of it. But for me, it’s useful

[00:05:47] for people in my network to see. There are law firms that funny enough, they’ll mention it to you, although they won’t

[00:05:52] like or comment, but it comes up in conversation saying, “Oh, I saw that post.” And then another client, another

[00:05:58] partner saying, “I saw that as well.” I said, “Well, neither of you liked or commented on it, but they don’t want to. They just enjoy viewing it.” So, to

[00:06:07] answer the question, all of our work comes through introductions and recommendations. So, I literally have a

[00:06:12] network of people that I know that specialise in helping law firms. That’s only who I talk to. That’s who I spend

[00:06:18] my time with. And you curate that yourself for the people that you like and you trust and that you think can

[00:06:24] actually you ask them about what they do for firms. And do you believe that that would be good advice to someone? And

[00:06:29] would you introduce them? They’re the ones I keep in touch with. And it’s those it’s those relationships that

[00:06:34] introduce work because a managing partner will be sat there, they’ll talk about a problem that is in the sphere of

[00:06:40] it and every time that an intro comes up, someone will say, “You need to speak to Alex.” And that’s how it starts. And

[00:06:47] and so tell me then because I imagine it would have been broadly similar to us

[00:06:52] MLT Digital and that our work was broadly had has been broadly similar in

[00:06:58] terms of the tools and the techniques that we deployed to help law firms generate business online

[00:07:03] between 2009 and 2022.

[00:07:08] Yeah. Then open AI released chat GPT.

[00:07:15] AI started to enter more sort of common usage despite at that time still

[00:07:22] being fairly niche. Yeah. And quite rudimentary

[00:07:27] as it has evolved over the course of the past 2 to three years.

[00:07:33] The entire language and ecosystem has shifted. Yeah. Has that been reflected in the

[00:07:39] type of questions that are that you are now asked by your either your law firm customers or your prospective law?

[00:07:46] Absolutely. Yeah and it’s not always

[00:07:51] the top of the listing that they should be doing if that makes sense. They might have other infrastructure or legacy problems that need to be fixed, but it

[00:07:59] brings a pressure. It brings a pressure into their conversation, their world. It could be a pressure from I was at an

[00:08:07] event with another managing partner who was waxing lyrical about what they’re doing. How accurate that is is you know

[00:08:13] is doesn’t need to be known but it puts pressure on what are we doing? What can I say? What your clients have the same

[00:08:20] thing. Their expectations have shifted. So the clients of law firms expect

[00:08:25] something more. They want to know how is your firm considering leveraging using

[00:08:31] AI but safely and so that it’s quality control. It doesn’t bring risk

[00:08:37] to me, but I want you to do it use it to potentially reduce my fees or especially where it’s laborious work. I don’t want

[00:08:43] to pay 200 an hour for 16 people to read, you know, boxes and boxes of discovery. There’s obvious areas where a

[00:08:50] client expectation changes. There’s the referral network and relationship

[00:08:56] pressure. So when you’re talking to your introducers because law firms, a lot of their work comes through word of mouth

[00:09:02] as well as the brand and reputational marketing. What conversation are you having with your network, your

[00:09:09] introducers, your referrers and also your people. Your people want to know and if you don’t control it from a people

[00:09:15] perspective, there was a big firm Hill View sorry Hill Dickinson. Yeah.

[00:09:20] W were noted they had to block chat GPT. People were just using it. Yeah. So as a leader of a law firm, how

[00:09:26] are you actually going to direct your people and what’s your narrative and how do you guide them on it? I don’t think I

[00:09:32] don’t think doing nothing is an option and it’s not because irrespective of what the AI vendors want you to do, forget that for a minute, park that. But

[00:09:39] as the leader of a law firm, unfortunately, I don’t think you can just sit back and it’s the same for us

[00:09:44] by the way, it’s the same for you, same for everybody. And so pitch

[00:09:49] you know that we work with a lot of law firms of a particular size. In many

[00:09:54] cases you will have different partners responsible for different things.

[00:10:00] I’m the IT partner of one of those firms. I’ve got a number

[00:10:07] of competing interests for my time including a combined pressure of u

[00:10:14] billing. Yes. combined with actually running the IT function.

[00:10:20] I don’t want to be you. Would that be a common type of person that you would

[00:10:26] help people like? Yeah. Because again that pressure that what was the phrase I used before where they’ve had

[00:10:32] enough of a scenario is that it’s untenable. You can’t you can’t effectively do those because what you

[00:10:37] end up with as the partner leading it is all these people around you

[00:10:42] letting you down. But it’s normally it’s a it’s a tale of two halves. It’s because you’re not you can’t lead and

[00:10:48] direct and spot the gaps and you can’t run it. You can be involved in it, but it’s hard to do.

[00:10:53] It’s hard to do. This season of the Your Law Firm Success podcast is brought to you by MLT Digital and Receptio.

[00:11:00] MLT Digital is the market leader in the UK legal sector at deploying AI to

[00:11:07] assist law firms in their online business generation efforts. Increasingly, online business generation

[00:11:13] for law firms has been is a battle waged on many fronts and there is no one

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[00:11:49] or receptio.ai. So imagine again I’m in that scenario. I’m that person. I feel as if my tech is

[00:11:58] largely in order. Yeah, I’ve already worked with you or somebody like you. We have our case management

[00:12:03] system up and running. We have our voice over IP. We have our telephone systems. We are not in a situation where

[00:12:12] we are firefighting around tech. Yeah. But as you say, I’m being asked by

[00:12:18] clients and staff and I’ve got an eye on competition who

[00:12:24] are making noises about their use of it. And I’m like a rabbit in the headlights.

[00:12:29] So where do I start? So we’ll work with firms and ask them to

[00:12:35] start with their narrative on that. You need a stance so that you can communicate to all those people that

[00:12:42] we’ve said and that might be it could be one short p it could be one paragraph could be one piece.

[00:12:49] sometimes you might split it into clients want something slightly different compared to what people want to hear internally. For example, you

[00:12:55] might have an internal and external narrative. But in simple terms, it’s about

[00:13:02] the pressure. It’s about a building pressure pot that’s coming all the time and the steam’s building up inside it.

[00:13:07] The narrative allows you to take that lid off and let some steam out and get thought and control of what’s going on.

[00:13:12] So the best place to start is to have that narrative and that can rarely be done in isolation by that lead partner

[00:13:19] needs to be done with the other partners. But it’s about how do you how do you run kind of a workshop support

[00:13:25] was not a term that a partner IT partner would use when running a session with other partners but they need to get

[00:13:32] together as a collective to say who do we need to be able to communicate with about AI and emerging technology. So,

[00:13:40] it’s our clients, our introducers, referrers, our people, and the

[00:13:45] leadership team. As a leadership team, we need to know what we’re doing and we need to all agree on how we’re going to progress with it. And

[00:13:52] ultimately, you need to have a narrative that gives you the confidence to be able to communicate on it. So, what are the key components that need to be part of

[00:13:58] that? So, who are we as a firm? Do we want to be h are we a high volume

[00:14:04] practice that needs technology to be able to protect margin to deliver things in a time scale because if you are your

[00:14:10] narrative will be different to if you are we are not that we are a boutique litigation firm that is focused on

[00:14:17] specialist advice at the highest level we are calm collected and controlled and we’re a high margin low volume business

[00:14:24] you see what I mean there so there are different scenarios where tech plays a different part and it’s normally to do

[00:14:29] with the volume and the nature of the practice. So, it’s easier if you’re

[00:14:36] a specialist firm because you’re either dealing with residential property and you can have a stance or you’re dealing

[00:14:41] with corporate and commercial litigation, you can have a stance. That that’s a bit easier in my mind. When

[00:14:46] you’ve got a general practice, you might need to have an overarching global

[00:14:51] narrative, but then you need some nuance for within it. So, it’s harder the more complex the business is but

[00:14:59] to where to start is to pull that narrative together. So if we use an example of our specialist firm which is

[00:15:04] the same for a practice area in law firm. It’s about understanding who do we need to communicate with what’s

[00:15:11] important to us in terms of AI and emerging tech. Who do we want to be? We want to make sure that quality is part

[00:15:16] of it. We want to make sure it’s controlled. We want to make sure it’s human led. We want to make sure that we are running things in the right order

[00:15:23] so tech isn’t running us. there’s certain things that will need to be part of that for them to stand behind it and

[00:15:29] what do what do the client and the industry expect from us as well and how do we merge those two just in a really

[00:15:35] simple way to say so when somebody asks you what you’re doing with AI and emerging tech you can say this is what

[00:15:41] we’re doing this is what we think about it this is why we’re not rushing in this is how we’re taking care of compliance

[00:15:47] this is how we’re controlling how we are using it not how it’s using us and this is how we’re going to better serve

[00:15:53] you with it so you Can you almost need to split it into a grid and then come up

[00:15:58] with your narrative? Can you ask chat GPT for that? Well, you could do, couldn’t you?

[00:16:04] But what the output we will give you depends on these different things what you’re going to put into it and do you find is this something

[00:16:11] that you’re dealing with a lot? It’s the start point for a lot of time. So with law firms, we’re not doing bear in mind we are not a high-volume low

[00:16:18] margin practice. We deal with boutique firms and there’s a limit to the ones we deal with. So, you know,

[00:16:24] we’re quite clear with trying to help firms. The start points for us is do you need a narrative or have you already got

[00:16:29] a communication level that you’re comfortable with that you’re already using. If you’ve got that, then it’s just it’s about starting with use cases

[00:16:36] and looking internally. Forget all this noise. I saw a graphic the other day.

[00:16:41] There’s over 750 I think I saw that as Yeah. legal tech products, half of

[00:16:46] which, you know, not going to be around, are they? In a couple of years. So, you can’t look at that noise. you

[00:16:52] need to you need to take control and ownership of that of that problem. But it’s where do you start and how do

[00:16:58] you do it? And I think it’s narrative if you need to communicate takes the pressure off and then it enables you to

[00:17:03] communicate internally and externally. And then it’s about where are we going to start using this?

[00:17:09] Where’s the use cases? So I’m assuming then that narrative as I say it’s a bit like a mission statement

[00:17:15] an overarching statement for the firm which is then broken down if needs be.

[00:17:21] Obviously, if you have one firm doing one strain of work, this isn’t required. But if you’re doing like a general

[00:17:27] practice firm, a similar sort of sub statement for

[00:17:33] each of those areas because that will also bring into play the fact that and we’ve discussed this

[00:17:40] before in this that in many in many environments I don’t

[00:17:46] know whether this has changed but certainly the legal environment it used to be that the cleverest partner was in the room was the one who could spot the

[00:17:51] 1% wrong with an otherwise brilliant idea. M and build the most

[00:17:57] and so you will get partners who just be like this is not for me. Yeah. But that’s why so when you’ve got

[00:18:04] this if you call it a global narrative or a firm narrative if you’ve got 10 partners that are heading up practice

[00:18:10] areas for a large regional practice half’s kind of corporate and half’s private client. You might have eight of

[00:18:16] those that just it doesn’t it doesn’t matter. I don’t have that pressure. I want something to communicate. I don’t

[00:18:21] need to add into it. We’re happy to adopt that. But you might have somebody that’s really passionate about the

[00:18:26] residential property department. The narrative’s been crafted by the head of corporate and

[00:18:32] commercial. They run very different worlds and they want to be able to put a bit of their own stamp on it. So it’s

[00:18:37] just not blocking that in my mind. You need to do that as you as you would run a partnership. That’s obviously not

[00:18:42] my decision, but I would allow these people to as other individuals where they want to have a bit of an input

[00:18:47] but not bog down the whole thing. They might just want to be able to have a little twist on it or be able to say,

[00:18:53] “Well, for us that’s not quite right or we want to be able to include this.” Well, how would you want to include that? Well, that’s fine. And then just

[00:18:59] have their own slight amendment, you know, or addition to it. They might want to block that. Some firms don’t like it.

[00:19:05] They want to have things locked down. But it’s not about controlling people. It’s about it’s like you say, a mission

[00:19:10] statement. So if you’re not going to do that, you need something that you can all in principle get behind and more

[00:19:16] importantly you can all communicate to those people. So could you if a if a client asks you what you going to say

[00:19:23] when one of your people asks you what you going to say? Are you able to do that? Are you confident doing it? And do

[00:19:28] you need any training and support to help you do that? And once you’re able to that’s it. It doesn’t really it’s

[00:19:34] arguably it’s half about the stance. There’s certain things that need to be there but it’s about being confident enough to go we know what we’re doing.

[00:19:40] you know, we’re here to look after you and this is how we’re doing it. And so once you have that stance, I

[00:19:46] imagine you get into a situation where you’re then saying like we have our stance

[00:19:51] internal, external, compliance, risk.

[00:19:56] I imagine that’s the starting point for then beginning on the back of that to

[00:20:05] begin considering which areas are most appropriate.

[00:20:10] for the consideration and potential deployment of AI within

[00:20:16] them. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. And sometimes it might come the other way. You might have a a partner

[00:20:22] that is chomping at the bit because they’re either under pressure or they can see the opportunity. You know,

[00:20:28] everyone’s different, aren’t they, in terms of how they’re going to engage with it and approach with it and how tech aware, tech savvy, tech interested

[00:20:35] they are so sometimes that pressure does sometimes that opportunity comes

[00:20:40] from within where there’s one person going I’d love to be able to explore use

[00:20:45] cases within my department and there’s others that are just so busy with the workload that they don’t have the

[00:20:51] capacity or the interest to do it and they will let one leading partner start a journey so that we can we can all

[00:20:58] benefit via osmosis for the for the other things that will naturally just spread out because there are certain

[00:21:03] things that spread out and certain things that are Yeah, absolutely. Only specific to a case, not

[00:21:08] even not even a practice area to a case type. Yeah. Do you see what I mean? So, it’s like And you’ve mentioned twice the phrase

[00:21:16] use case. Yeah. Can you explain a bit more about that? So the reason just

[00:21:23] firstly the reason I mention it a lot is because a with technology

[00:21:28] there’s so many vendors that are trying to tell you

[00:21:35] AI is available we’ve got it this is how you use it in some cases and it can

[00:21:42] just be adopted and it’s in my opinion bearing in mind I do I’m engaged in this for a living with change and

[00:21:48] understanding fee owners and practice areas to to work with them to adopt or engage with a

[00:21:54] change and then adopt it and use it. Use cases is really important. So to

[00:21:59] define what it is to me at a basic level is irrespective of the tool because there’s lot there’s 750 tools out there.

[00:22:06] So if we’re going to select one, we need to understand how and where we are going

[00:22:11] to use AI within our practice area and case type so that we can then select

[00:22:18] something. So I look at it from a pure selection basis. If you don’t know your requirements, you cannot select anything

[00:22:25] successfully. It’s impossible. So we use the same methodology that we’ve always used for selecting a new

[00:22:31] case management system. It’s the same. What are the key components that you need to use this technology for and what

[00:22:36] are the requirements specifically of how you want to use it? Because don’t worry about whether it’s possible. I I put

[00:22:43] £100 in an envelope now and you can have it. If it is, it will you know what I mean. It’s it will be available. it will be and if it’s not available you can

[00:22:50] build it faster at a third of the price it’s that’s not the issue and the challenge is people are so busy it’s

[00:22:57] this overwhelm again everywhere you turn on any computer go to any event any article it’s AI AI AI and you cannot

[00:23:06] move forward with another demo you can’t move forward with another product coming to the market you need to move forward

[00:23:13] by understanding how you’re going to use the software So I jump on that because it’s a generic

[00:23:19] phrase that everyone can stop and think, well actually, yeah, we don’t know our use cases. Even if they don’t really know

[00:23:24] where to start with or what a use case is, they know roughly we don’t know how we’re going to use this.

[00:23:30] So I’m standing there fixed staring mouth a gape at one of

[00:23:38] these events thinking about AI. First stance, first approach or stage one is

[00:23:46] define your stance and get some help defining your stance

[00:23:51] for your internal stakeholders, your clients, regulatory bodies,

[00:23:58] taking into account risk and compliance. Absolutely. Always. Yeah. Yep.

[00:24:03] Once that is defined, what one has to do is take a step back

[00:24:09] and think of the areas in your practice in which you believe AI could help.

[00:24:16] Mhm. In terms of efficiency reducing laborious, time consuming,

[00:24:22] costly activities in a way that is compliant with the stance.

[00:24:27] Yeah. that you’ve taken and then again using you or somebody like you work on

[00:24:33] identifying which tools out there are likely to be able to support you in achieving your objectives. Yeah. But you

[00:24:40] once you’ve done the use case side. So we’ll try and drill it down specifically. So say you say you have

[00:24:48] a practice area. Practice areas can have many case types. So, if you again I keep saying

[00:24:54] residential because it’s it’s just easier for me to kind of explain it, but you can be buying a

[00:25:01] property, selling a property, remortgaging a property, changing a title on a property. They they’re different things. They might have components that

[00:25:07] are the same, but they’re actually different case processes. So what you

[00:25:12] need to do is again you don’t go wide, you go really narrow. You’ve got the stance. You know how you’re going to

[00:25:17] communicate. You see if there’s a partner that wants to lead the charge on doing some investigation because you

[00:25:22] need to start working towards that stance. And it’s absolutely in my mind it’s an evolution. There’s no big bang

[00:25:28] here without disruption and risk. You need to evolve this and it’s layered. So, it’s about then saying

[00:25:34] right we’ve got a partner that’s engaged that wants to go through this and put

[00:25:39] some time and resource into trying to lift these use cases out of what we do.

[00:25:45] From there, the next best thing to do is look at case types. Be specific on So,

[00:25:50] we did some work for a firm recently where they had three different practice areas, but there was like 12 or

[00:25:58] 15 case types in there. So, so we need to pick four case types maximum. And I’m not talking about I’m talking about the

[00:26:04] individual case scenario like buying a house, selling a house, re mortgage. So then when we did that, we can then go

[00:26:10] through and understand at a high level. Let’s document. And by

[00:26:15] document I could mean open a word document, type one and put the first step and do all your steps. 1 2 3 4 5 6

[00:26:22] 7 8 9 10 steps that we have that high level that we go through when there’s a case. M then you go to step one and you indent

[00:26:28] it in a and you just put another layer of detail, peel the onion and talk about what is the extra information we do

[00:26:35] within that. So we’ll effectively draw them out a workflow diagram that says this is where the case comes in.

[00:26:42] This is what happens from a marketing and BD perspective because as you’ll be as you as you know as you’re working with there’s AI opportunities in there.

[00:26:49] When is it then converted to a case? Who engages with it? What role against each of these? Is it secretary, on boarding

[00:26:56] team, admin? When’s it hit the fee earner? What system does it change from? Is it in HubSpot for marketing? Then it

[00:27:02] goes directly into the case management system. You know, you just follow it all through.

[00:27:07] And then when you’ve got that by a case type, you can start to then go through it and discuss where are the problems, where is the

[00:27:14] inefficiency, where is the labour, where is the repetition, and think about your boxes again. Externally, where is the

[00:27:21] perception and the expectations changed? Whereas the pressure on we’re getting pushed up against fees when we’ve got to

[00:27:27] do the discovery piece because they don’t they don’t want to pay you know open book at £200 an hour anymore.

[00:27:32] They’re looking for a fixed fee at 5k to do that right that’s an opportunity. Do you see what I mean? So that’s this is

[00:27:38] where you start to lift your use cases but you do it with your knowledge internally not based on what someone’s

[00:27:43] trying to sell you. You’ve got to and then it’s from there you can then get into specifics. you break that down and

[00:27:48] go what tends to happen is there’ll be certain areas that are low hanging

[00:27:54] fruit that might even be able to be grouped into co-pilot’s a really good safe zone

[00:28:00] for people to start out with because it’s inherits a lot of the compliance and data privacy policy that you need

[00:28:06] and you can use it off the back of meetings. It’s a really good way for firms to just engage. If there’s

[00:28:12] pressure from your people, co-pilot’s a great way to give them something that you can do at scale,

[00:28:17] control it, and then start to tailor things by practice area. But that that’s how you lift your use cases. It’s not

[00:28:22] we’re not talking about anything tech there. We’re talking about what we know as a firm. We need to get that down. We need

[00:28:28] to get it in a diagram. We need to discuss the problems, where the opportunities are based on where is the

[00:28:33] pressure coming from. So where did the clients expectations change and also what what do our people know on I don’t

[00:28:38] want to be doing that bit because I know that tech can fix that because I’m a young fee earner right well we need to agree and understand how we’re actually

[00:28:45] going to do that in a manner that I as the partner by the way I’m happy with that the regulatory bodies will be happy

[00:28:50] with oh sorry Stephen that you’ll be happy with and then do you see what I mean and control it

[00:28:56] from that way I think one of the one of the ways that we try

[00:29:02] and talk to clients about it is when you’re using a case management system, this traditional tech, you’re using it.

[00:29:08] You go in, you click a button, it time records, it does what you need and what you tell it to do effectively. AI is

[00:29:15] different. AI is how are we working? How do we need to work as a human? How do we

[00:29:21] need to control this case and how can it piggyback us to help us do it faster but

[00:29:26] our way? Yeah. Do you see what I mean? You’ve got it’s how one is using technology, case

[00:29:31] management system. AI needs to support you in your journey. It’s called co-pilot for a reason. It’s not flying

[00:29:37] the plane. The human’s flying the plane. Human is the pilot. Brilliant. And finally,

[00:29:44] what in briefly is your view on where I

[00:29:49] where AI is going in the legal sector? Um I think there’s different pressures

[00:29:54] in the sector. So I think if you are for example if you’re a big corporate firm you know

[00:30:00] top tier firm you’ve got pressure from in-house council that don’t want to be paying

[00:30:06] you4 million pound bill anymore. So there’s that is really active. There’s a lot of pressure. In-house council have

[00:30:11] got budgets to go and find tech to reduce those bills. That is a lot of pressure. The big clients have got the same

[00:30:18] thing. If they’re spending millions of pounds a year on retainers and council they want those brought down. It all

[00:30:24] filters down in the same way, but in terms of where it will where it will go.

[00:30:30] I think ultimately a law firm still needs to be able to process that case, don’t they? They need

[00:30:36] to be able to deliver that case in that manner that they’re happy with. Tech will help speed things up. Some people

[00:30:41] will get there faster than others. I think where you’re in a really specialist

[00:30:47] practice area or even you’re doing specific case types, you will see competitors coming out that’ll be new

[00:30:53] start firms that are just doing it with tech straight off the bat. But it’ll be where the low hanging fruit is

[00:31:00] that those partners will know that there’s certain case types where it is just 15

[00:31:06] steps every time and you that they are majorly under threat. they are under threat and if

[00:31:12] what are you going to do about those that’s a leadership discussion because that that is coming I I don’t

[00:31:17] see any way it can change but where it needs more of the human input and you know if it’s litigation

[00:31:24] for example there’ll be certain areas where you want that firm to be using AI

[00:31:29] safely to help them but there’s just a lot of pressure at the minute and once the lid’s gone off and you’ve got a few things to talk about saying well your

[00:31:35] key pay point is discovery yeah we’re now doing we’ve got a package for discovery where we do use tech. It’s our

[00:31:41] tool. It’s tailored. It’s got all these things that are part of it. You could start to win business. The pressure’s off so you’re not losing

[00:31:47] business and then you carry on. But it’s a big pressure pot at the minute. I don’t think it needs to all be

[00:31:52] fixed now. I think you need that narrative. You need to protect your ground and you need to look at

[00:31:58] realistically where are the case types that if they are not automated you know someone else is going to do

[00:32:03] it and even do you still want to do it if it is do you wanna do you want to do that? All right. Well, brilliant. Thank you.

[00:32:10] You’re welcome. Thanks very much for your time. As I say, that probably signifies a good

[00:32:15] end. She said, “That’s enough.” She’s like, “We stop this guy talking.” Yeah. Right. Thank you very much, Alex. You’re welcome, Stephen. So, thank you very much to Alex. You can

[00:32:22] find him on LinkedIn, Alex Hutcherson. And I’m sure you can get his email

[00:32:27] address and we’ll include any more details in the comments.