My wife and I recently went on a ‘date’ to a panel discussion about legal tech (who says romance is dead?) organized by the excellent Tech Thursday group in Calgary. The group brings together experts in various technology areas every week for lively panel discussions, networking, chats, and drinks.
If you are in Calgary (or Winnipeg) and work in tech or a tech-adjacent sector like marketing, I can’t recommend the sessions highly enough. This particular week, the topic was legal tech, so I suggested to my wife, a highly experienced lawyer qualified to practice in Canada and the UK, that we go along.
The session was interesting for many reasons. The panel consisted of four lawyers (including the moderator) and one tech founder, which was a departure from the usual mix of speakers. As a result, we got a different style of discourse - as MC Philippe noted that this was the first time someone on the panel used the word ‘Byzantine’.
Despite the wide range of tech developments over the last few years, there was something of an obsession with AI. About 80% of the discussion was directly or indirectly related to artificial intelligence and how they expect it to impact the legal profession, for better or worse.
I fully understand that as a technology breakthrough into the mainstream in the same way that Generative AI has (and Gen AI was the main topic), there is a clamour for everyone to jump on board and have an opinion, but this can be a challenge.
Firstly, there are lots of exciting things happening with legal tech. In fairness, the other 20% of the discussion focused on using Power BI and efficiency gains through tech. But I wanted to hear some blue-sky thinking from the panel about how else tech could be shaking up the legal profession.
For example, is there anything happening with contract law and BlockChain? How can automation speed up M&A in capital markets? Why do lawyers still use Faxes??
Talking to Mrs Holder on the way to A&W (it was date night), I was wondering why this was. Is it the lawyers’ mindset that, in general, they are so resistant to change that it takes technology to become part of the zeitgeist before being forced to confront it? It is worth noting that for all the talk of Gen AI, several firms, including my wife’s, have banned Chat GPT, not least because of several incidents of lawyers who have been caught out by Chat GPT hallucinations.
Working in marketing, the resistance to change is interesting. We constantly look for new ideas, ways to work differently, and ways to innovate for our clients and their customers. It may be leaning into a lazy stereotype, but Lawyers like to play things safer. Maybe it is a mindset that you need to do things literally by the book. Maybe it is a threat to jobs or fees.
Or maybe they need tech to solve problems in their practice rather than trying to find a way to shoe-horn in something new and shiny.
This is in no way a criticism of the speakers. They all represented organizations looking to bring technology into the law, and I can understand why they were pushing so hard on Gen AI; it would have been nice to have a few other ideas brought to the table.
And next time for date night, we might just stick to dinner and a movie.