A week from the ‘Geek: what went down at Legal Geek 2018

I remember attending one of the first Legal Geek meet-ups. Thirty or so lawyers and developers chatting legal tech over pizza and beer. Buzzwords flying around like hornets and awkward high fives - where you miss the hand a bit and it doesn’t make a good noise? Fast forward three years to an incredibly well executed conference of 2000 enthusiasts gathering in a huge, multi-stage venue in Brick Lane, landing audible high-fives like seasoned pros. It’s remarkable how much Jimmy Vestbirk and his team have achieved in such a short period of time.

But this conference felt different.

The first Legal Geek conference in 2016 was pretty radical. It was unrecognisable from the average legal conference, where suited masses sit cabaret-style for hours on end, chasing CPD points over tiny sandwiches until the minute it’s acceptable to slope off. Whether it was the food trucks replacing the sandwiches, the inspiring speakers from around the world or simply the sense of fun that went alongside the innovation, those of us that attended then knew that this would be big. 

That first conference was all about the future. It focused on ‘what could happen’ in legal services: which were the emerging technologies, the new platforms, and who was going to do it. The then-scandalous ‘no ties’ rule was in place, but the 'no robot pictures' edict was yet to be implemented and certainly I remember a good few darkening the slide decks.

Refreshingly, the second conference in 2017 focused more on ‘what are we actually going to do’. All sorts of people from across the community came together, whether law firms, consultants, developers or startups; and the time came in the hype cycle where someone actually has to start writing cheques. Momentum was building for the movement, with a 100% increase in attendance from the previous year, with people getting really serious about actually using the technologies available.

But the 2018 event last week focused on something much more interesting, and arguably more profound. There was something in the air at this one. A collective will to change legal services not simply through buying technology; but instead through service design, user experience and by challenging human behaviours. It was a technology conference all about people: how they can drive innovation within their organisations - whether law firms, in house legal teams or the public sector - with or without technology. It spilled into two days, with the second focusing on how design thinking can help to transform legal, and the way users experience it. This is the era of legal design.

Here are some of the highlights from two days that took the movement forward in significant, practical ways.

Joanna Goodman, Julia Salasky, Ivy Wong and Caroline Ferguson took part in a Women in LawTech panel, discussing the challenges women face at the intersection of two industries - law and technology - that still have a great deal of work to do when it comes to gender diversity. Joanna highlighted the need for great female role models at all levels - from Law Society President Christina Blacklaws to leaders at tech startups.

If you're a woman in lawtech looking for mentors, or more resources, head on over to Legal Geek's site - their scheme has already matched 44 mentors and mentees.

I chatted to Zoopla's General Counsel, Ned Staple, on stage about how to actually effect change in-house. "You can waste a huge amount of time working with products that have a bad user experience," Ned said - again emphasising the importance of design in making sure innovation is actually adopted. Similarly legal design hero Marie Potel-Saville explained how she made the first digital-native influencer agreement, using a browser-based approach that felt familiar to millennials to make sure they sign on the dotted line.

In the afternoon session, legal AI guru Richard Tromans took the mic and challenged the conference to change the means of production for legal.

His array of speakers on stage ranged from Richard Collins at the SRA to Shmuli Goldberg, who chastened us with the warning that the overwhelming majority of legal technology fails to be adopted. Digitory Legal's Catherine Krow also highlighted the danger of shelfware - she advised incentivising lawyers to commit to innovation and to pilot programmes, to avoid the risk that game-changing solutions stay on the shelf, instead of actually being use.

Halebury CEO Denise Nurse - author of the vendor management chapter in our legal operations eBook - took the stage to share her journey in creating a law firm with a 50/50 gender ratio.

The elephant in the room is that law firms have been doing well without diversity, so why should we change? Well guess what, just because you give more to others, doesn’t mean there’s less for you - there’s abundance in our industry.

Mary Bonsor at F-LEX gave advice on how law firms can better engage millennials, and Julie Brannan talked through the new Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) and how it will impact the profession.

Information designer Stefania Passera and I took the stage to talk through how we created Juro's privacy policy - better known as a privacy notice that people actually read. Through taking a design approach we went from the same number of pageviews of our privacy policy as everyone else (almost none) to thousands a day. Check out the slides from our presentation below - to find out more, check out the policy here, and more detail on our process here.

Nicole Bradick summed up the ethos and the pain points behind legal design in the most succinct way:

Your features don't matter in your software if your interface sucks

We couldn't agree more.

Of course, design thinking isn’t new, and applying it to legal isn’t new either: the movement has been around for some time. But the progress to date, and the enthusiasm we saw last week, is only the beginning. Fatigued by cries to "do AI" and “think about blockchain,” those who actually have to innovate within their organisations - rather than chanting advice from the sidelines - are looking for the quick wins. They are looking for an holistic approach to delivering legal services in 2018, and this is what legal design is there to help them do.

We at Juro were proud to have supported the LegalDesignGeek conference, and take our message to current and future collaborators at both conferences. Bring on 2019 - who knows where the movement will take us by then.