Lawtech Sounding Board

Technology is a valuable tool for increasing productivity and competitiveness, yet the incorporation of technology into legal services remains limited. To support the development and adoption of technology into practice, the City Corporation created the Lawtech Sounding Board (LTSB), which provides an anti-competitive forum for discussion between the legal and technology communities. Its aim is to foster a better understanding of common issues and to encourage development of solutions-based products and processes that will evolve legal service delivery.

Established in 2019, the LTSB acts as the leading cross-sector forum for innovation across the UK legal services industry.  Through it, members explore the opportunities and challenges presented by technology and drive positive change and innovation in the sector. It is a forum for collaboration, made up of private practice, in house, government, regulatory and tech professionals.

The plenary meets quarterly to discuss success stories, barriers to tech adoption, and think about legal innovation in the UK and future trends more broadly. The LTSB also has several working groups, where members come together to undertake more direct activity to support the tech and legal ecosystems.

One LTSB working group is currently leading a series of roundtables focussed on ‘Tech Transformation: The Missing Conversations.” This recognises the vital role that technology will play in the future delivery of legal services, but also the challenges that are often encountered by tech transformation projects across private practice and in-house functions. The roundtables’ objective is to open discussions around the drivers for tech transformation and how it can be conducted in a way that meets its full potential and the objectives of all those involved across the legal services supply chain. By exploring the topic from the perspective of in-house counsel, private practice and tech vendors the project’s aim is to encourage a fresh and open dialogue that will accelerate positive change across the legal sector.

During the first roundtable, hosted with representatives from in house counsel, we learned that the top drivers for tech adoption for them were operational efficiency and cost reduction—though they felt this was not the same for private practice. In addition, they expressed that interest in a product was highly dependant on ease of integration. Some of the main challenges they experience when implementing a technology project is lack of clear mandate from the top, a constant clash with procurement teams and tech solutions not being user friendly, which impacts adoption.

On the second roundtable with law firms, we learned that— contrary to in house counsel’s beliefs— they too ranked operational efficiency and cost reduction as the top driver of tech adoption. They highlighted how law firms have a variety of ‘clients’ and a range of stakeholders when it comes to digital transformation, and how they need to navigate these different interests to be able to successfully implement a project. Law firms would like tech providers to better understand their business and functional requirements, competences, skills, governance, and business models.

We’ll be hosting our third roundtable on the 2^nd of February with tech vendors to continue identifying the missing conversations in tech transformation projects. f you are a tech vendor and interested in participating, please get in touch below. 

The City Corporation acts as secretariat for the LTSB, and meetings are chaired by Catherine McGuinness.

Current members include representatives from: