Emelie Skoghag: How Legal Technologists Transform Law Firms

We explore the craft of legal technology with Emelie Skoghag, from mapping real workflows to building AI-enabled processes that people actually use. We share how gamified adoption, flexible data handling, and a focus on return on experience lift quality, confidence, and speed.

• defining the legal technologist role at the law–tech edge
• mapping core processes before choosing tools
• balancing firm standards with partner preferences
• using gamification to drive engagement and learning
• measuring ROI alongside ROE to capture experience
• handling unstructured client data with flexible workflows
• how AI reshapes junior work and reduces stress
• why lawyers are more open to change than assumed

Transcript

Philip 0:06

Hello and welcome to the latest episode in Garfood AI's podcast series called Litigating AI. My name is Philip, and I'm the CEO of GarFord. And in this podcast series, I have the privilege of speaking to very interesting people who are involved in the Law Tech AI revolution, either founders, policymakers, from governments, legal technologists, people within law firms, people that buy technology, buy AI products, all sorts of people. Today I'm privileged to be joined by Emily Goldhard. Hello, Emily.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

Hello, Philip. Thank you for having me.

Philip 0:45

How did I do? Did I manage to without the name?

SPEAKER_02 0:47

Oh, you did brilliant. Absolutely.

What A Legal Technologist Does

Philip 0:51

So that's one thing I've been really worried about for the last few days. But for the listener's benefit, I should say that Emily very kindly gave me a hint as to how to pronounce her name, so I didn't sound too uncomfortable. I'm going to say a couple of quick things about Emily because I'm sure the way she'll be very modest on herself, and then we'll jump straight into it. For me, one of the most interesting parts of the AI revolution as far as it relates to law is that it's creating effectively a new type of profession. And we now have people who it's okay to use to be lawyers, it's okay to use to be technologists who sort of jump into the other world and become a bit of both. And so lawyers who become technologists become legal technologists, and technologists who start to do more law become legal technologists in the other direction. And Emily is such a person. So, Emily, let's begin with the obvious question. How would you describe a legal technologist? You know, what is your role and what has been your background to get to this point?

SPEAKER_02 1:49

So I would say that being a legal technologist pertains to working in the intersection between tech and law. I work currently as a legal technologist at TLA Piper Sweden. Uh and my experience includes working with everything from procurement of legal tech tools, implementing said tools on a firm-wide scale, uh, as well as working with legal transformation projects, uh enabling AI-enabled processes throughout the firm and driving innovation. So it's a business development point of view within the tech sphere in legal, I guess you could say.

Buy, Build, And Integrate Tools

Philip 2:24

So you you talked a bit about buying and training, but it sounds like you also do a bit of building as well internally.

SPEAKER_02 2:29

Yes. So it sort of is the whole flow from end to end. Uh everything from actually identifying what is the relevant tools to be looking at. I mean, we never start off on a whim by saying we're gonna buy a tech and we're gonna buy a new tool. Rather, uh it's a long process of primarily focusing on the frustrations and pain points of the colleagues or clients that we are working with, all the way up to adoption, implementation, upskilling, and then building workflows within those tools. And I should note that there's always some chaining involved as well. So if you do have a tech stack that is uh quite extensive, obviously you don't want to use those tools in a silo. So building those workflows from end to end, implementing the entire tech stack within so we make sure that we don't have any licenses that are sitting and collecting dust somewhere.

Philip 3:21

Well, exactly. Yes, you've got to spend the money sensibly, don't you? So I I think we're gonna jump into that really interesting explanation in a bit more detail in a few moments. But I thought we'd also talk a bit about how you've got here and what's your journey. Because I I think you're a lawyer by background.

SPEAKER_02 3:35

So I actually started off on the NGO path. So I was working at a non-profit called Gott Jesna, which offers free legal advice and uh legal representation in the administrative courts to the unhoused and vulnerable in Stockholm, Uppsala Malme, and Lund in Sweden. Uh and thereafter I moved into uh or at first I did a short stint at serious law school uh in Hamburg, where I specialized in legal technology and operations was law firm strategy and management. And then I joined ELA Piper back in 2022 with the legal tech department. So coming from the legal side of things, but having those business process improvement experiences throughout, I would say. So that's sort of what drove me into the direction of legal tech, aside from obviously having a tech and AI interest.

Philip 4:25

Would you say that it's really, really helpful to have a legal background moving into this world? Do you think it gives you advantages? Again, somebody who might just have a tech background moving into a legal technologist role?

Process Before Product

SPEAKER_02 4:38

There are benefits, I'd say, namely in that lawyers can only explain so much. Uh and usually it's it's on a overarching level. So it's quite easy to describe a general workflow. But then when you do try to specify it, it usually tends to narrow down to, well, it depends. Um or you actually end up being stuck in the difficulties of people being unable to explain the exact process. So they might say, Well, then I contact the client, but how do you do it? Do you is it an email? What's in the email? What's in the contents? What needs to be a part of the deliverable here? So I think having a legal background can definitely aid in that, but it's not a requirement, I would say, by any means. Uh uh but the fact-finding mission uh I'm sure is easier.

Philip 5:28

You sort of speak the language of the lawyers to the lawyers, and it sort of helps in sort of a bridge of translation. One thing on this topic that I found really interesting is so I I've had a very similar experience at Garfield, but what I found interesting is sometimes being gently challenged back by, in my case, the development team who aren't lawyers, when they will sometimes say, okay, well, you say, Philip, that a lawyer would do this, but actually, approached objectively and without any sort of prior experience of doing it as a lawyer, surely it's more rational to do that. And they offer a different answer. And of course, sometimes I'd say, no, it's not right. That's not right because and there'd be a good reason because sometimes I think uh actually, yeah. Actually, that's why do we do it that way? We could do it the way they've just detected. That's so much more rational. And and so do you have that experience from time to time where actually you look at legal workflows and think this process is making it more efficient. We can improve on things that lawyers would otherwise historically do.

SPEAKER_02 6:24

Absolutely. I usually work from a framework as well where it's a it's an iterative process where you start off not narrowing down on how to implement the process in tech, for example, how to build an AI-enabled workflow, but rather you start off with the core issue. So what is the frustration or the pain point there? And that can be quite hard to define, but usually after a couple of layers you kind of get to the bottom of like, oh, it's actually this thing that's bothering me. Uh and then you might take a completely different approach. Usually it's after you find or locate the uh exact issue, you move on to the process and the process mapping. So there might be changes to the process that could be implemented today that doesn't require any tech at all, where it's just a unspoken rule or norm where it's always being done that way and no one's ever challenged why that is. But it's quite often that you also land in the latter box, which is the product. So uh you actually do need a tool to alleviate that frustration. But you can't jump off in the deep end, so say. I think you have to start off with the groundwork and actually do the process mapping and see what can be improved with sort of the quick wins today before moving on to actually finding a tool that's suiting the issue. Because most of the time, if you do buy in a tool and you want to fit it properly to the current process, it gets so convoluted and it's so complicated that usually there's not a single tool out on the market that's going to be the right fit for that process. So you might have to be open to adjust the process to fit the tool rather than the opposite.

Philip 8:00

Yeah, and that makes perfect sense. I thought it was really interesting what you said then about the fact that sometimes as part of your sort of looking at the processes being undertaken, you find that there are efficiencies that could be gained that actually don't need some whiz-bang complicated AI solution. It's just that having an independent third party look at it and say, hang on a moment, why do we do it this way is itself valuable. So actually, sort of legal technologists don't just add value because they they say, oh, we can put AI into this and make your life easier or solve this problem. They also add value by saying, actually, we don't need an AI tool, we can solve it this other way.

Mapping Core Workflows

SPEAKER_02 8:36

Well, yes, certainly. It's uh definitely a benefit, I think, coming from a firm-wide perspective. So one of the key benefits that I pertain to my job at least is that I do this business process improvement work in every competence group, meaning that I'm also I have a reference point in regards to how other practice groups work in their core processes. And that's something that we have worked extensively on is the core process mapping throughout the firm. And it's it's funny because you actually do find a lot of similarities even in fields that you wouldn't necessarily think are the same. I did an initiative a couple of years back where I offered sort of a one-to-one partner session with all the partners at the firm where you could book an hour with me where I would go through the current legal tech stack that we had with a goal of keeping everyone up to speed. Obviously, this opened up a second more interesting side effect of it or added bonus of it, which was that I started off every session by asking the partner to describe their day-to-day work. Uh, and that actually led to them describing their workflows and how they worked in their legal area. And that was really interesting afterwards because you were able to find out so much more about similarities, not just in type of legal work, but what type of documents do they work with? Are there similarities between how often it's agreements or uh the size of the material, the scope of the work, or how can we better find synergies here? It doesn't really have to do with tech at all, but it did help us to identify the core practice groups when testing certain types of tools. Uh so it was a benefit moving forward as well, both for the firm and for the practice groups, I would say.

Philip 10:25

Yeah, I imagine the partners would have learned from that quite a lot about not just what tools they've got, but also what further tools might be available that might help them in their day-to-day work. So just talking a little bit more about how you map workflows, how does that actually work? Do you sort of sit down with lawyers in a department and say, tell me about how you deal with this particular matter or what do you do on a day-to-day basis, and then you just sort of do sort of QA with them. Is that how that works?

SPEAKER_02 10:50

We've done a variety of different methods. So depending on the size of the workflow, because I want to divide that term up to meaning a bunch of different things. So if you do if you talk about a workflow, that's end-to-end legal process. That's quite a large project. It usually involves tons of lawyers and a ray of workshops set up. Uh, perhaps you pull in multiple practice groups, etc., etc. So it's quite a larger uh undertaking. Uh whereas if you're focusing or narrowing it down to only a single workflow where you have to do a specific task, for example, uh, then usually it might be a sit-down, it might be an in-depth interview where you're talking about not just perceptions but expectations and describing what you want a workflow to be like and what the current process is and what's sort of the key metrics that need to be met, uh, as well as some formalities that need to be set up, as well as where you need humans in the loop, etc. etc. It's very dependent on the size of the workflow, I would say. If you work with core processes, then you do need to make sure that you are eliminating any chance that there's person-dependent step in this process. Some people can be very particular about the way things are done, but that might just be them. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

And I mean that leveling. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 12:17

Uh so in that case you do kind of need to have a few reference points, control groups where you're checking up and asking people independently of each other to make sure that you're not following the whim of someone who's done it that way since eternity, and that's because it's supposed to be that way. And usually that's that's being done by these said control groups and sort of extracting information or testing the information against the others. So at times it might be that I would suggest that as a possibility, and then they would usually respond by saying, No, we don't do that, or you're yes, that that would actually be great, or that's not how I do it at all, but that sounds good. Uh so you can sort of benchmark it against the other people in the firm as well.

Balancing Standards And Preferences

Philip 13:04

When I was a very young lawyer back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, inevitably, when you were a young lawyer, you act you, you know, you work on cases for multiple partners in a law firm, and every partner's got their own way of doing things. And one of the exciting challenges of being a young lawyer was that you had to understand how the partner you worked on in a particular case wanted to do things, which might be wildly different than another partner you're working for simultaneously. And you don't want to get them all confused. And I did obviously at that time think that's all a little bit inefficient. I may have perpetrated the same thing myself when I was a partner. So maybe I could learn so much better. Um But I'm I'm wondering, is there a bit of a challenge for legal technologists in this and that you have to be tactful as well? Because you might have to go into a department and persuade some partners who are quite different in their way that actually the majority consent is that that is no longer a good way of doing something, and here is the preferred way of doing it. Uh and I'm also mindful in this that I also have known the odd partner or two in my time, um, and I'm not going to name names, of course, who would quite happily agree to change a protest. And then you'd find out sometime later that in fact uh they just reverted back to the old protest the moment no one had back was turned. So I imagine there's a certain degree of needing to sort of persuade and cajole people to sort of adopt something new.

SPEAKER_02 14:23

In some regards, yes. You do need to be mindful so that everyone is on board on the training. And the last thing that we want is for us to iterate and actually create a process that then doesn't get followed. If it's very clear that certain individuals have a strong preference in their ways of working, you can actually shift your mindset to see that as a feature rather than an issue. So that's usually something that we also build into the workflow. For example, this milestone needs to be flexible. Before this stage, we do need to ensure that there's a flexibility in the way of to going forward. Obviously that can be done in every single workflow, but if it's a matter of preference on let's say f certain types of phrasing, then clearly that's something that can be built in as well. Uh it doesn't have to be, as with everything in AI, it doesn't have to be completely stagnant. So you can build that flexibility and build out the tree structure of what to do when moving forward. It's something that if at least speaking from my experience that I've built in, for example, when you utilize previous precedents from the firm, then I might have two batches uh where it's one partner's typical writing in one batch and perhaps the rest in another.

Philip 15:42

In a different batch.

SPEAKER_02 15:44

Exactly. Or it might be, you know, divided up. So there might be four, five, six, seven different ones. It's dependent on how many people have strong opinions on the ways to structure things. But seeing as you don't have the same challenges with AI today compared to previous machine learning tools where you needed huge amounts of training data and validation data, etc. Whereas today you could probably make use of a few good examples. It's not really that much of a hurdle anymore to actually being able to um customize or build bespoke workflows. So I would say that it's very much about being a good listener to seeing the needs of the organization and for the team as well. Because I think if you do find that you get those people on board, it usually changes the way the entire adoption of the workflow. And it might be small things. It might be very, very small things that needs to be changed. Usually it's it's never required that I I n need set up separate batches. It might be as easy as knowing that the final check should be in a certain way. But I think it's a benefit regardless, because once you map out the process and you find out that this partner actually requires this to consider the work done correctly, then what you're doing is actually you're codifying those uncertainties that I'm sure that a lot of junior lawyers have regardless. So it's the mapping is actually part of the process improvement as well.

Making Adoption Engaging

Philip 17:14

And makes junior lawyers' life a bit easier as a consequence because it reduces some of those uncertainties. But I guess it sort of raises a sort of ancillary question about adoption, as we're on that topic at the moment. And that is um, are there ways to sort of make adoption easier by making it more fun? And in saying this, I'm always mindful of some advice I was given as a very young lawyer by a very teenager. We in England we call them a book Queen's Council, King's Council Barrister. Who's uh he's a very funny man as well as a very effective barrister? And part of the reason he's very effective is very amusing, you know, entertaining. And part of the way you persuade people to reach a conclusion or do something is to become engaging. You know, they look forward to listening to you if you're an advocate or using your product, or otherwise it's a pleasurable experience as opposed to a painful one. Is there any sort of ways you can make adoption easier by making it a bit more fun?

SPEAKER_02 18:07

Oh, that's actually one of my favourite topics. I'm glad you asked. I want to go to that.

Philip 18:12

I should be asking that question.

SPEAKER_02 18:14

Uh no, certainly. It's uh I think being able to deliver any sort of content in an engaging, enthusiastic manner is definitely a way to combat sort of the information fatigue or the resistance to learning that we find today. In particular because lawyers are busy as they are. So being able to make learning material or new information or adoption initiatives something fun is actually a great way to make it more accessible. And that's sort of the trickery against the information fatigue, because I think most people are familiar with opening up the intranet and seeing new information and you can't really take it in because you're stressed or in the middle of something else, and you're thinking of your client's matter that you're in the middle of, uh, and how to tackle that one. So how to disrupt that flow of information and that information fatigue. I think one of the best things you can do is to add a bit of gamification element to it. One of the things that we were requested to do during a Nordic conference that we were holding was to talk a bit about legal tech at the firm and how we work with it on a mindset level. Sadly, none of me or or my colleagues were able to attend the session. So they had asked us to send a recorded speech on on the topic, which might be the worst format for talking about innovation efforts. Uh is to have a pre-recorded session. Uh so I think we had to toy with the format a little bit to make people still engaged. I'm not sure if you know it, but there's a YouTube channel called 72 Questions with Vogue. Where it's it's a it's a show from Vogue magazine where they walk into different celebrities' houses and follow them along as they ask 72 questions.

Philip 19:56

Well, that's a lot of questions.

SPEAKER_02 19:58

Yes, but it's it's usually one of the uh like picking one of the apples or the other. So apples repair, etc. etc. And the celebrity answers questions while they walk through their gigantic homes. So we decided to take the same approach, but walking through the office at DLA Piper Sweden, firing rapid fire questions about Legal Tech and our our the Legal Tech team and our work with innovation at DLA Piper, and I was really appreciated. I will say that it took quite a few attempts before we got the final version. Um one of the issues we had that was that our videographer was wearing heels at the time and we heard the clicking throughout the video, so we had to redo redo everything. Um but we walked through the entire office, including going down the elevator, into the lounge, uh, grabbing a coffee, etc. etc. And it was a really fun way to toy with how you put forth information. And it's something that I still get asked about nearly three years later if I still have that video. So it really can make an impact if you make it more fun or take a more creative approach.

Philip 21:06

And with gamification, is that trying to sort of engage with people's dopamine channels and giving them a little bit of reward if they follow the the right processes in the right way?

Gamification In Practice

SPEAKER_02 21:16

That's one element of it. So um everything from if you use Microsoft Planner, if you check under uh the My Day tab and you and you tick off all the tasks that you've done for the day, it will pop up with a star saying you did it. So to sort of give you those little dopamine hits of uh uh you completed all of your tasks today and that's that's brilliant work. Uh so that's sort of a very narrow example of gamification efforts. So it's integrating game elements uh like points, tier lists, challenges, games to sort of raise motivation or race engagement, and it's really thinking creative. On how to make a process more fun. So it can be everything from sending out the top user along with a gold star on the internal channel to bump up the leaderboard, if you will. Uh and and to give credit words too, clearly. Or it can be implementing the fun into a process or a learning process. And there's there's some really interesting initiatives that's being done, say in Legal Tech in general. It's also just building it into a process where you can. So for example, when we run pilots testing a new legal tech tool at DLA Piper Sweden or uh testing a proof of concept, we usually tend to have quite a lot of checkoff lists that's also with gamification elements. So it's sort of like completing the next level in a in a mobile game app.

Philip 22:50

It reminds me of a conversation I had a very long time ago. And there was some discussion about making a particular thing fun. And one of the most senior partners in the room, he sort of bristled at that concept. He said, fun, fun. Law is not supposed to be fun, it's a job. And I remember at the time thinking to myself, well, why shouldn't it be a bit fun? I mean, lawyers work very long hours, work very hard, they're very devoted to the work they do and trying to achieve their clients' outcomes. And why shouldn't a big part of their life be at least a little bit fun? I really like the idea of encouraging adoption by adding these like beautiful little touches, what some people refer to as delight moments that just help to sort of inject a bit of a sparkle into your legal day as a working person in a law firm. Let's move on to another topic, actually, that I was also going to ask you, and that is um measuring impact from all of this. I mean, I I I don't want you to sort of talk about DLA's internal sort of secrets and stuff, but um, just on a very high-level perspective, how do you sort of measure impact with this sort of workload? Do you have any particular metrics? Can you quantify sort of reduction in risk? Those sorts of things.

SPEAKER_02 23:59

I think it's dependent on what you pick as a value metric, to be honest. That tends to be different for every single process, I would say. If the value metric might be cost cutting, you're gonna have different types of KPIs. And if we're talking quality enhancement or extra trust, etc., then those are gonna be completely different. I will say that there's in general quite a challenge that we s we we have today in measuring adoption. It is a bit fussy. And I think a lot of it pertains to the fact that it's a disconnect between seeing um, you know, user statistics and raw data and what sort of connections you can do with that. I do like to talk not only about ROIs, but also ROE. So not just journal investment, rather return on experience. Uh so that's sort of circling back to the people part of the process and how do our colleagues and clients experience the work and the output with these new tools in place, etc. Or with a new workflow in place. That is something that I think is equally valuable because it obviously ties in with a lot of other important questions. So everything from client retention to colleague retention clearly, and colleague satisfaction as well as quality. So I think it's something that needs to be looked at with a very critical eye and to not just go based on the numbers, but to take in a large array of data. And by that I mean complementing usually with not only the raw usage statistic that you're looking at, but taking in other factors, conducting in-depth interviews or sending out questionnaires based on experience, et cetera, et cetera, to sort of complement the picture and to get the full gist of the actual added benefit.

Measuring Impact: ROI And ROE

Philip 25:54

That makes perfect sense. It reminds me very much of discussions I used to have as a lawyer where when you're selling legal services, particularly sort of work I used to do, which was big ticket, complex commercial dispute stuff, you never sold on cost, but you only ever sold on quality and client experience. And cost was sort of it was a factor, but it's very much a secondary factor because clients were looking for somebody to help them who they would not only get really good legal assistance with, but also enjoy working with. They'd get a satisfactory human experience as well. And ROE is a very interesting idea to me because I really think that it might be slightly overlooked at the moment with people talking about the AI revolution in LawTech, because people are focusing a lot, particularly in the media, on cost. But really, yes, they should be focusing a lot more and primarily on how the experience improves, as you say, for clients, for practicing lawyers, for everyone actually in the ecosystem, you know, the court staff, everyone. Moving on to just another quick topic: data reality. Now, this is something that is very strongly in my wheelhouse because one thing I used to be very conscious of at my former firm, TYK, was that in law firms, data tends to be everywhere and it's not consistent and it's not coherent. So lawyers will save data in different places in different ways. There wouldn't be sort of one data repository that could be mined. And in fact, I'm thinking back to the really old days when I first started, where there would be boxes of paper actually everywhere. Some people would have rooms full of boxes of paper, and you'd always think, how the earth could they operate? But actually, they seem to know where everything was. That's presumably one of your challenges that you're needing to try and impose more sort of consistency and coherency onto the data that flows through a law firm in order to sort of build AI processes on top?

SPEAKER_02 27:34

Both yes and no. In terms of keeping our own ducks in a row, yes. So everything internally is certainly a part of that equation. How do we structure our own documents and how do we structure our o our own management systems and throughout? How do we make that neat coherent and reliable? But part of the reality today is that we cannot enforce our clients to use the same neat structured boxes that uh that we use. It's frankly not realistic that we can require the exact same level of structured works as what we currently have in our mapping systems with metadata, etcetera, etc. So I think you do need to be mindful when you're both in procurement and in building workflows later on, that you need to have structures in place to allow for that flexibility. It's really hard to build a workflow based on everything working as it's supposed to. I mean, I've seen data come in in all shapes and forms and some are harder to read than others. That's just a reality of a lawyer's everyday life. And there are ways to alleviate it to ensure that the flexibility actually works. So being able to be quite active in driving development with your suppliers or partners on different aspects of Fed tools that need to be flexible. Being able to use drag or drop or uh incorporating SIP files or building on to that flexibility is something that we as in this case the actual customer need to be really strict about to ensure that our tools alleviate that issue as much as possible. But also being humble about the fact that it's it will be difficult because there there will always come up with a new new issue uh that you've never seen before and that's that's uh a complete new unheard of question that will appear. So it's the balance of keeping the own data structured, having the flexibility of taking in raw data that is completely unstructured, and implementing implementing good systems and processes on our side on how to structure that raw unstructured data. And I mean that's certainly something that can be done with the help of AI or similar tools.

Data Reality And Flexibility

Philip 29:57

And that's of course um been a big part of my life the last two years, because we get um unstructured data at the beginning of a of a case, and then we have to um impose order and coherency on it. One of the things I find quite amusing uh as part of what we deal with is that um here in England we've got this court API, which is incredibly useful, but it is getting a little bit obsolescent. And I don't think I'm upsetting anyone by saying that because I think even the court service would like to have a brand new one. And certainly I know the judiciary would, and so would practitioners. And it's interesting that um some parts of the protest are handled by the API, but then there's some parts of it that suddenly you start getting emails from court officials. And of course, some court officials will have one protest, and some court officials have a different protest, even though there is an overarching set of civil procedure rules. They all have their own interpretation. And so you then have to end up building a tool that can handle multiple different forms of data. So, you know, not just sending data programmatically over an API suddenly or receiving unstructured emails and having to sort of deal with those. It's part of the fun of legal AI, I think, sort of having to handle this world. I think over time it will get better because, of course, there'll be more and more APIs, there'll be more structure put on different data types, and um, we'll end up with sort of common standards at some point, I think, for a lot of things. Uh some of which will be imposed from the outside. So I imagine, for example, as courts start to deploy APIs, that will inevitably impose standards upon people that use the court services. So there's two further topics I just wanted to take your mind on before we close. Uh the first topic is the future role of junior lawyers and what your thoughts are there. And obviously I'm uh I'm getting a bit long in the tooth now myself, um, but you are much younger and you will have sort of opinions which are much closer, sort of, to you know, because you're in the same generation. But I was wondering what your thoughts are on junior lawyers and what their future holds. Ooh, good question.

SPEAKER_02 31:54

I would say the the future role of junior lawyers I think will be very exciting to see in the near future. I don't think it's gonna be as apocalyptic as some of the legal news report it to be. I think we're gonna see a shift in what type of tasks a junior might have done in the past comparatively to what they do today. And I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. Particularly with the fact that the younger generations are brought up with AI natively already. So I think it won't be anything weird in in their eyes when they enter the workforce and are already using AI because they have been using AI the whole time. I do think there's gonna be a awkward few years perhaps where we we need to iron out the kinks of how training actually is going to be done and how do you tackle those questions? And I I don't think that's something that I will be able to answer today. It's clearly it's gonna be a long ongoing discussion. Um but I see a shift in the role of mentorship. And I think that mentorship will take a much larger role. That it will be less of sort of the filling out forms work that may have been tasks of the past where we can automize a large chunk today with the use of AI and other tools. I don't know. What do you think?

Junior Lawyers And AI

Philip 33:22

I've been going around and saying what I think on this topic. So my own view of this is that I think first of all, I agree with you entirely. I think it's a very exciting time to be a junior lawyer. I think what's going to happen is that a lot of the dogs' bodywork that junior lawyers have inflicted upon them at north um is going to go away. And I and I I'm not being rude to anyone there because a very long time ago, you know, shortly after sort of the Jurassic period, I was a junior lawyer myself. And um I had to do a lot of due diligence exercises and disclosure and taking notes of meetings and trying to take a note of a judge talking in court. Time-intensive, but not particularly high-value tasks. I think a lot of that will go. And you end up doing the sort of work that I wanted to do as a junior lawyer, you know, the higher value stuff, like thinking about strategy and advising on a case on how to develop the argument and interviewing witnesses and doing negotiations and settling cases, stuff like that. So I think that's very exciting. One thing actually I've not mentioned yet in uh any of my occasional sort of using that is something I heard actually not longer just the other day. And it was a junior lawyer speaking, and it was really interesting. He was saying that one of the things about her job she used to find very stressful was she didn't really felt that she had somebody to turn to with lots of what she would regard as sort of basic questions. So she sort of muddled through. And she said she found that very stressful, but she didn't know if what she was doing was right. The reason that she said she didn't feel she could turn to anyone was that she felt the partner she worked for was too busy. And also she felt embarrassed about asking the questions of another busy lawyer. And she said that she feels a lot less stressed now because she's got a LaTeX product, which is sort of a buddy on her computer. So if she gets really stuck, she can say, hey, what about this? And she'll get an answer. And most of the time she feels like she's got the level experience already to be able to evaluate whether the answer is a sustensible one or not. And I thought that's great because she was saying that it actually materially was reducing her stress level on a weekly basis, which I think is a really positive thing. Have you seen that within DLA? People saying, hey, I'm a bit less stressed now because of all these great things.

SPEAKER_02 35:24

Word by word. Okay. I've actually had that verbatim being said to me when I I conducted an in-depth interview. Gosh, it must have been in February of 2024 or something, like ages ago, where we were following up based on a pilot testing that had been done. And one of the junior associates specifically said the added benefit of having a legal buddy that she could use as a sounding board. So that was definitely to bounce back ideas and sort of get the first. I know this is a dumb question, but other times it might just have been sufficient to use it as a sounding board, get a quick recall and then be confident again and moving on.

Philip 36:06

Yes. I mean it's definitely a positive thing. So traditionally in a lot of English law firms, particularly bigger ones, lawyers tend to share an office anyway. And the idea is as a junior lawyer learn from osmosis from the more senior person in your room. But not all English law firms do that. And of course, many are small and can't do that. And I know a lot of foreign law firms don't take that approach whatsoever. You know, you just get given an office and off you go. And so I can see that it might be a very valuable thing across the entire global legal community. This is sort of a general lowering of legal stress across the world. Let's move on to the final topic. Can you think of one thing that has surprised you the most about your journey through legal AI and being a technologist at DLA, something you've seen that you thought, gosh, that's really surprising.

SPEAKER_02 36:55

Yes. So uh something that surprised me the most, I would say, is that people often tend to underestimate how open-minded lawyers are to change. So I would actually say that with the right preparations, it's not a hurdle. It's rather something that people are actively seeking and are welcoming with open arms. So something that surprised me would say how easy it is to find time, even though you talk about lawyers being very, very busy and uh that there's a lot of you know work on their plate, which which certainly is true, but just how open people are to working with improvements and innovation. And I think that's something we've definitely seen grow exponentially, in particular since the AI boom, where people might have had preconceived ideas in the past of uh how long the startup process was of implementing a new tool. Uh whereas today people can see that we can be up and running in quite little time. It it doesn't necessarily take that long anymore. People are so much more open to working with business improvement and get tickled by the thought of improving things, uh, even if that means improving the metadata, which might not sound like the most um exciting thing. No. But weirdly enough, some people really love it. So uh myself included. So you can definitely find people are willing to take the time everywhere, and I think that's that's uh a really nice surprise. Uh I definitely had a preconceived notion that people were going to be too busy to talk. I've found the opposite to be true completely.

Philip 38:35

Maybe partly it's because all their stress levels have been reduced by all the AI they're already using. Um, I I'm semi-joking, but it leads that led back to the last sort of topic we were talking about. I know exactly what you mean about the point about it depends upon from what level you're looking at what lawyers do and what their protesters are, but you can obviously look from a very high level where you can conceptualize everything, or you can look from a very low granular level where you're literally looking at exact steps that someone's doing. And whenever we get onto this sort of topic, Dan always teases me a lot, so my co-founder Dan, and they likes to point out that uh from a very, very high level indeed, you can see a lawyer basically as a function. And the inputs are information and coffee, and the outputs are documents. I don't know if there's a bit more of a legal experience than that, but I mean anyone with a mathematics background, Norbus D can easily think in terms of formula and functions. So I think this has been a wonderful opportunity to talk about uh what legal technologists do, Emily. And I think it's very exciting. You're you're, I think, very much at the vanguard at the front of a of a new, almost a new profession, a new area of legal services, which is sort of combining the best of both worlds. And I think it's going to be very exciting to see what you and other people who have got the same sort of role as you and other big law firms build and come up with and buy and adapt. And um, I'm very grateful that you've joined me today. So thank you very much indeed.

SPEAKER_02 40:06

Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.