Artificial Intelligence for Law Firms

In the latest episode of the podcast, Andy James joins host Pete Filitz to delve into the transformative role of AI in law firms. They kick off the discussion by exploring the current applications of AI, highlighting how it’s already streamlining tasks such as document review, legal research, and contract analysis. Andy emphasizes that AI is not about replacing lawyers but augmenting their capabilities, allowing them to focus on more strategic and complex aspects of their work.

They outline the key benefits of integrating AI into legal practices. These include increased efficiency, reduced costs, and improved accuracy in routine tasks. Andy shares insights on how AI can go beyond generative AI to help law firms stay competitive in a rapidly evolving industry by enhancing their service offerings and client satisfaction.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:04

Hello and welcome to the BCN Podcast. Today we're going to be exploring how AI is revolutionizing business process in the legal industry. Today I have the pleasure of welcoming Andy James. He heads up our productivity team here at BCN. And as always, Andy, great to have you on today's conversation. Thanks so much for joining. No worries. Thank you for having me. So, Andy, obviously a passionate subject that I know you and the team are heavily invested in, all things AI, obviously something that's continuously evolving and changing. For the audience that don't know you yet, I know you've been a regular guest on our conversations. Why don't you give them a quick introduction in terms of who you are and what you're doing for BCN and our clients?

Andy James: 0:57

So I look after our productivity solutions team. We do all things SharePoint and Power Platform. And we try to use those platforms to build solutions and apps and automations, chatbots, whatever it might be, to kind of uh smooth over and fix business processes, try to make people's lives easier, free people's time up. Everyone's so busy. So we try to make anything to give you some time back in the day so you can focus on the things that you need to focus on and leave the automations and apps and bots and bits to do what they're good at. Brilliant.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30

Andy, I think what we need to do is firstly just dispel the myths around AI. I know businesses and people have their own interpretations and ideas of what AI is, but for our business audience, specifically our audience in the legal sector, what do we mean by AI?

Andy James: 1:53

Oh, there's a that's an easy question to get started with. A number of conversations we have with people, we have to almost go back to basics and say not all AI is equal. AI is a really generic term. It's like saying you have a car, brilliant. What make, what model, what engine size, you know, there's a hundred and million different ways of looking at it. For law firms specifically, when we're talking about AI, we're looking at things to improve productivity, to give them some time back, to make life easier, to save money, just to be more productive in the day. So that could be all kinds of things from summarizing to helping kind of chop through and look through documentations and legislation, thing that AI is really good at assessing, transforming data, and again is giving that time back to people who make decisions and take the the human approach when they're dealing with with their clients and with people. Great.

SPEAKER_00: 2:55

Now, before businesses start on that AI journey, and it is a journey because it's something that is going to evolve over time with a business and its needs, there are certain prerequisites that need to be in place. There needs to be a certain maturity in terms of where they are on that digital transformation journey. Where, from an ideal perspective, we want to see businesses so that they can really start leveraging this. And and I appreciate there are different maturity points for different AI opportunities, right?

Andy James: 3:33

Oh, 100%, 100%. And I think the type of AI you get and what we can do will absolutely depend on where you are on that journey. So, for example, if you're kind of at the beginning of that journey and you're still using Excel as a database and you're just running Excel spreadsheets, actually, there's going to be a limited amount of things we can do because of the nature of how that data lives and where it's stored and how it's structured. There are definitely things we can do. Copilot 365 touches in there, we can do all kinds of things to make that process easier. But when we look more holistically, it's still quite immature or it's still quite early on in that journey. We need to move to more kind of structured, managed, scalable databases instead of Excel spreadsheets. We also need to have a look or a think about data governance. So with a number of law firms, you're going to be dealing with some really sensitive information, and we need to make sure that if all your information are in documents and spreadsheets and words and PDFs and whatever it might be that are saved in a platform like SharePoint, that's brilliant. That's where I suspect most business information lives, you know, allowing for the integration across Microsoft and all the benefits that come with it. But it is also easy in SharePoint to overshare documents, folders, and libraries. And you may unknowingly give people access to folders and libraries that they shouldn't have access to. The person themselves may not realize this unless they go hunting and stumble across it. But when that person is using AI, the AI model will have access to the same thing that the person does potentially. So we just need to do some due diligence, make sure that the data's structured appropriately, that it's secured, managed, accessed appropriately and safely, especially with client identifiable information and more personal material. And we're looking more at that kind of data governance, data management. We have structured data, we have clear processes for managing our data, for managing processes. That's where AI can sit on top really nicely and smooth that process over and then build on that brilliant foundation.

SPEAKER_00: 5:44

Fantastic. And I think Mark, Mark Rotherham, our CTO, has articulated the different stages on that AI journey where you've got the reactive, proactive, embedded, and transformational. And talking about copilot for 365, which is a virtual assistant to help boost productivity, we sort of classify that as reactive AI. It's something that is available to everyone out of the box, so to speak. If you're an Office 365 client, you get copilot chat you can turn on and use today, which is a much safer alternative to open AI chat GBT, which businesses are really concerned with from a data leakage perspective, because whatever you put into ChatGBT, right, Andy, you're giving it to ChatGTP.

Andy James: 6:37

Yeah, it's completely outside of your control as soon as you've uploaded or used it.

SPEAKER_00: 6:42

For legal firms where they're working on sensitive information, ChatGBT is really a no-no. And if businesses have not looked into that, they need to. And consider giving their staff copilot chat, right? Which is safe and secure, and there's guardrails in place that Microsoft have ensured and maintains data protection.

Andy James: 7:08

Yeah, absolutely. All of that information stays in your tenant, in your organization. None of it gets leaked outside, none of it gets used by Microsoft to train their models. The chatbots exist, and they can help you interrogate and transform that information, but that's as far as it goes. Nothing is shared, moved, or used externally. So absolutely the safest option.

SPEAKER_00: 7:31

A good starting point for businesses, specifically law firms, looking to embark on that AI journey is looking at leveraging that to sort of ignite the interest because people don't really know quite how to use it and what the benefits are.

Andy James: 7:48

Yeah, and we found this with things like PowerAutomate in the past, where we would go and speak to clients and we talk about automating, and there wasn't the context to really have a really good conversation. So we found a use case, we found some mundane repetitive task that someone was doing, we automated it. Once people could see it, then everyone thought, oh, I get it now. Let's do this. What about that? What about the other? And we're finding we're having the same conversations with AI. We talk about AI so generically, what does it really mean? What can we use it for? We have conversations with clients who say, I'll just put AI on it. That doesn't really mean anything. We need to look at what is your business challenge you've got, what's your business process, what's the data, what is it you want to get out of this? Is it AI to summarize documents, which is one thing? Is it to help cascade information or transform something? Is it for the AI to go and go through legislative changes and identify anything that's relevant to something you're looking at or talking about? They're all AI, but just in different forms. So we need to understand what's either the process or the challenge that you've got, and then we can look at the best AI tool that we can put on top of it to serve that. A fantastic one, as you say, is the the chat in Edge, which is all kind of GPT-based and it does the same kind of thing. You can ask it questions, it can tell you about meetings, it can summarize your week from Teams and all kinds of stuff. But the other thing that's really good for is getting people used to talking to AI. Because when we're talking to it and we're building those prompts like tell me about this thing, that's a skill in itself. And the people who get the most return from AI are those who kind of learn how to talk to it and interact with it and tell it exactly what you want it to do so it can give you that right response. So that's a a really good entry point to m dealing with AI and learning those skills. Yeah, spot on.

SPEAKER_00: 9:47

Because I think we're we're all Google experts, and the biggest mistake I personally made was I treated it like Google, and it's absolutely not the right thing to do because it works very differently. The more detail you provide it, the more context you give it, the richer the response, and the better the value you will get in return. And not all AI is equal. So going back to your car analogy, you know, it's making sure that you take the right AI model and service and apply it to the right business case. So we've talked about dipping your toes in the water, so to speak, what's out there out of the box. You've got co-pilot chat, which is part and parcel of the Microsoft Office 365 suite. You've then got the Microsoft 365 co-pilot, which is the personal assistant, which is an add-on license to 365, and that really gives you a whole new level of productivity experience within the 365 ecosystem. But to really be able to leverage that, you need to be fully adopted at the 365 productivity suite. You need to have your data in there, and you need to be using all the products and services within the 365 suite, right? 100%, 100%.

Andy James: 11:08

Um 365 Copilot has access to your Outlook Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, the whole stack. So if you're not using those those systems, then it's going to be limited in what it can do. But if you are, that 365 copilot can be transformative, but transformative to the right people in the right roles. You know, if you're just using it to transcribe and manage meetings and get summaries, that's great. But if you're regularly generating content, generating reports, reviewing documents, developing PowerPoint, slide decks, all of this kind of generative, you know, work and tasks, using the copilot to help you get that first draft done in seconds for you to then go through and make tweaks and changes, it's absolutely transformative in those roles.

SPEAKER_00: 12:00

Yeah, and that's what we're seeing. I mean, uh Clifford Chance, a major legal player in the industry, has just rolled out copilot for 365 for their entire global workforce because the amount of time saved on a daily and weekly basis by their lawyers, barristers, and solicitors was exponential. And I talk from my own experience, and I Andy, you're using it as well. I mean, I have literally gained a day a week back in terms of productivity and time savings, leveraging co-pilot to respond to emails, to generate documents, take meeting notes. It has really revolutionized my job, and I can only speak from my personal experience. I know you've said much the same, right?

Andy James: 12:51

Massively so. If um someone tried to take my license off me, then I'd probably just pay for it myself because it is that transformative. I don't know how I would get through everything I need to get through without.

SPEAKER_00: 13:02

Yeah, I'm exactly the same. So then businesses, yes, automation's great, but now you can sprinkle some AI into the mix, which you know really does take that whole automation piece to the next level, right? Talk us through some of the business use cases you and the team have been working on in the legal sector with law firms that we were supporting.

Andy James: 13:25

This is really interesting because there are so many different levels, and this is where we always have to come back to what is the challenge that you were trying to address? Where's the pinch points or the challenges you've got that we want to smooth over? So we have some really simple things, really, really simple, where we have automations that look at customer emails that come in, and an email may come in, and currently people are having to look to identify what's it about, is it good or bad, who does it need to go to, and such the like. So a really simple thing we put in was just AI to look and there's sentiment analysis AI models to say is this person happy or sad? And if they're happy or sad, what are they happy or sad about? And then we give kind of a matrix to the AI to say, well, if they're happy or sad about this topic, it goes there, if it's that topic, it goes here. So the AI can start to do all of that triaging, but then we can build on a step further and we can say, Well, this email's come from Andy James, brilliant. Let me look up Andy James and our system. What other work have we got ongoing with Andy James? Who are the people involved in that? Right, I need to send a reply to Andy James. Instead of just sending a bog standard template that says, Hi Andy, thank you for your email, someone will be in touch. We can use AI to generate a personalised message to Andy based on the other things that are going on and reassured that if this is a complaint or an issue or there's a problem, we've passed it on to this specific person for this particular project or this case or this particular thing that's happening, or we can preemptively message that person and say, We've had this message from Andy about this thing, we know you're dealing with them for that thing to try and give that better customer experience and remove that kind of manual triaging. So some really simple, quick things we can put in place. As well as automations, we have uh chatbots, so we can load documents into chatbots, or we can point chatbots at a library of policies and legislation or other documents, or we can point chatbots at websites, public-facing websites or internal ones, so you can ask questions. Certain sectors of law are very, very black and white. You either were going over 70 miles an hour or you were not. So we can use chatbots to help triage these kind of issues that people are having, answer questions where they want to know is there mitigation around this, what should I do, what are kind of my options? And again, we can use chatbots now formally known as Co-Pilot Studio within Microsoft for members of the public to ask these questions, get some advice from a robot, but we already have built into Microsoft escalation to telephony systems or to Teams messages or emails, so that if it reaches a certain threshold or the person wants to speak to a person, we can manage that. But again, we're just reducing the amount of initial triage and customer engagement that needs to happen on some of the lower level, more straightforward things. For lawyers and solicitors themselves, there's a number of options around, you know, legislation changes can constantly. So we can use AI to kind of scrape through all of that information, and then we can use generative AI to generate briefing packs of this bit of legislation has changed, this is what it was, this is what it is now, this is the impact you've got. But then we could also use that to look at ongoing caseloads that would match that or be impacted by that legislation, and then highlight to those case owners that these are the things that are going on.

SPEAKER_00: 16:54

Those are the changes.

Andy James: 16:54

So again, depending on the problem you've got and where you want to go and where your data lives and that on data governance and maturity, the world's kind of your oyster. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 17:05

Opportunities are endless. But I think it's important to note, right? That you can start off small, keep it simple, don't overcomplicate it, and you can always build on what you've started. It's much like a Lego set. You might start with a few blocks, but you can always expand and grow, which keeps investment down to minimum, change to a minimum, but showcases how this technology can positively impact productivity within the legal workforce. And as we all know, in the legal sector, time is money. That is the product, that is the service that they deliver, and anything that can help them provide the service they do to their clients in a quicker, more efficient manner without the risk of human error and manual intervention, it's a game changer. And that analogy that Mark likes to use, you know, disrupt your business now or be prepared to be disrupted by your competitors. I met with a legal firm on Friday last week. They were expecting huge changes within the next 12 months with the adoption of AI. And just today, as I touched on earlier, on the legal IT insider, Clifford Chance has announced a global rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot for all their staff, which is a huge game change. And if you know the likes of Clifford Chance is doing this now, it's only a matter of time before the others follow suit. So a really interesting time. So I guess, Andy, that almost brings us to the end of today's conversation. What would be your parting words of wisdom, so to speak, to our legal clients in the industry out there looking to possibly embark on this AI journey or or dip their toes?

Andy James: 18:59

As always, there's a couple of things. Firstly, understand not all AI is equal. So comments like, I just want AI to do it, have a think about what is it you actually need, what are your business challenges, where is it that you want to try and make a positive impact, and then reach out, speak to us. There are loads of resources that we can look at, the different tools or models that would be able to help with that. I think the best place to start dipping your toe is with the co-pilot in Edge that has access to all of your teams and Outlook and bits, so you can start to use it, you can get used to asking it questions, you can upload documents and ask it to summarize documents. So it's a great low impact, easy way of kind of dipping your toe. Find a use case, find that thing, that report that we have to do for every single case that takes us four hours. Wouldn't it be amazing if that only took 20 minutes to get a first draft and then another half hour to review it? Once we've got that. Use case we can put something bespoke on, and it's exactly as you said. Once we've got it, we can then reuse that framework in other places so none of it's wasted. And if we want to enhance it and we want to change the AI, we just take that AI out and put a smart one on top in the future, but all that framework stays, so we don't waste any of that development. But finding that initial use case like we've had in the past with automations gives you that context, and it's like looking at the matrix, you just see all these other opportunities to use AI in automation. So not all AI is equal. Copilot in Edge to test it out and find a use case.

SPEAKER_00: 20:38

Brilliant. Wise words from a wise man. Thanks so much, Andy. That has been most insightful. And I guess just touching on that. So if you're a legal firm out there and you're a little unsure in terms of how to get started on this AI journey, reach out to us. We have got support from Microsoft. There's funding available as well for us to come in and do workshops with you and your teams to understand how AI can drive more efficiency and productivity within your business. It's not something to be scared of, it's something you need to embrace. Don't leave it to your IT guys. Digital transformation leveraging AI is driven by the end users doing the work. Thank you so much for joining us on today's conversation. Andy, lovely to see you as always. Thank you ever so much. Thanks, Pete. Don't forget to like and subscribe to our podcast. Feel free to visit our website, bcn.co.uk, for a wealth of information around what we're doing in the AI space. Also, if you're not quite ready to embark on the AI journey, but you want to get yourself ready for the journey, come and talk to us. We've got various AI readiness assessments and roadmaps that we can put you on to get you and your business ready to take advantage of this amazing innovative technology that is revolutionizing the league sector. Thanks so much for joining us.