How AI Has Affected the Responsibilities of a Law Firm IT Leader

Welcome to Reinventing Professionals, a podcast hosted by industry analyst Ari Kaplan, which shares ideas, guidance, and perspectives from market leaders shaping the next generation of legal and professional services This is Ari Kaplan, and I'm speaking today with Tony McKenna, the Chief Information Officer at Law Front, a group of regional law firms focused on providing legal services in the uk. Hi, Tony. How are you? I'm really well, outy great to see you.

It's my privilege. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Tell us about your background and your new role at Law Front. In the last 15, 20 years I've been in law joined up from utilities low margin business, really tight operating business and utilities, and come into law and felt, wow, this is a different place altogether.

Where, the quality of delivery was much higher in terms of it has to be a hundred percent every time from a change in technology point of view. Suddenly enjoyed my career in large international firms. And I decided to, join a startup law firm. So it's been pretty cool.

How does Law Front differ from a traditional law firm? Law Front differs significantly because the ownership model is different. For regional powerhouses we can work with the local team to buy out the partnership and, free them up to really focus on providing really great service to the region, the local area, and and invest in their brands and give them the opportunity with their investment capabilities to expand and grow and give them the opportunity to have probably technology that is out of their reach systems and processes that would be.

Not on their radar , to provide them with , a better experience from the back office, but also a much better experience from a client point of view, What advantages do law firms that align with Law Front have that other independent firms may not? The opportunity is that we can provide best of breed technology. So when you look at what Law Front is doing at the moment, a major part of my team's task at the moment is to get us all onto a standard platform. But that standard platform is moving these local independents onto the powerhouses of the legal technology landscape.

It's very difficult for independent local firms to have the buying power or indeed actually have the people in their teams. That are aware of the marketplace and what's available in the marketplace. So that's a significant advantage. Also, we bring the private equity capabilities to allow them to expand and grow their brand into areas and towns and cities in their region that they may have wanted to, but not really had the ability to, in terms of expertise and the ability from our, investment capability.

How does your experience as the former president of ILTA and an IT leader that is extremely familiar with the legal tech landscape, help your role as the new CIO of law front? It's actually really brilliant because I spent the last five years , in a really integral position with an elta. I've got the opportunity to meet with people all around the world and be really focused and what really great technology as I, I work really closely with the partners you know of ELTA in terms of technology, but also the G 100, the G 200, those CIOs that are.

Working at huge levels. And so being able to bring that into law front is brilliant because I can sit with my team, which is across the whole of the UK in six regional firms and talk to them about things that they just would never have the opportunity to. But I've also brought Elta into this organization because one of the strengths of lta, particularly in North America, is. That small to medium sized business, 'cause ELTA has hundreds of small business members and they get that opportunity to look at what the rest of the market is is using and therefore bringing that into.

Law front, we are then pushing that into six regional firms and they're getting to see what's available globally. So from my perspective, every day I seem to add a little bit of value and my experience over the last, 15, 20 years is being topped into on a regular basis. How does law front. Differ from other groups of regional law firms in the uk.

Our significant differences is that we invest in the regional brand. Law front is not about us being front of house, it's about the regional brand being front of house and the local economies that are very aware of their. Preferred law firm in that region. They see that is strengthened.

Our USP is we will work with you to build your brand your local connections and we'll bring great technology and process to support you. So that's a significant difference in the marketplace. Other players are more about taking it to make it a common brand across and that's not where Law Front is playing at all. What.

Types of law firms does law front focus on working with. We're looking for ambitious regional leaders people who feel that they've reached a point where they can't go any further, but they've built their business really successfully and they're looking for a partner to inject that capability, whether that's technology or investment capability and expertise. Ones that are really well established in the region. They have a really great reputation with clients.

And so that's significantly important to us. Are there specific practice areas that are best suited to working with law Front? We like to think ourself as a full service firm for regional high net worth. And indeed, people who come to us for point services you want to buy a house you, somebody's passed away.

You've got a will to deal with. So that, that's the kinda sweet spot. But we are full service so for those high net worths and small businesses in the region who want to have. Really professional high quality legal advice we support in that area as well.

How is AI affecting the law firm business model? First and foremost, it's not affecting. The law business or the business of law and the way that people probably protected maybe two or three years ago, when it was all chat GPT and it's gonna eat everybody's lunch and it's the kind of death of the lawyer and death of the administrator, accountants. It's not affecting us directly in that way.

Yet what it is doing is it's really come to fruition. That actually is about augmenting, it's supporting, I think, copilot fantastic. Use of language there. 'cause it is like having somebody alongside you, working with you to deliver the best value you can to your client.

We are still really understanding the use cases. And the same as, the big players are in the AI legal market. They're still understanding what their value proposition really is to law firms and developing them. So we like to partner with, aI providers who are saying, this is our platform, this is the tool set.

How can you use it to deliver better value? We use the Jello platform we use products like Avail and we can then, from a law front point of view, start to push them into those regional businesses and allow those regional businesses to understand. A regional use case, so it might be different in the Southwest, to the southeast or to the Midlands. Because there are regional differences across the uk you spent 15 or so years in IT leadership at various traditional large law firms.

What attracted you to law firm? I think the business model really attracted me. I spent 20 years in utility businesses where, the executive leadership of the organization really took accountability for the delivery of those services. So as a director of technology services and a utility business, you're the guy.

You have to make it happen. At the point I am in my career, when I sat down with Axel and Neil and Rachel and the team here, they were very clear about our accountability and that accountability to support the individual law firms grow and be as is as good as they can be and best in their local market. That was really appealing to me. Some of the challenges of working within Big Law is that partnership model.

It's quite short term. It's really hard to invest. And therefore when you're trying to put some real structural long-term change in play, it's really difficult for the leadership to to work around that, whereas. Here I'm working with a bunch of execs and managing partners who are all really focused on the future, and it's really different.

It's a very collegiate relationship built on common outcomes, common goals, and therefore it feels a lot more as a collegiate relationship as opposed to where you might feel in big law or in general loyal practices where the partnership model is a full equity partnership. Then, you're working for the owner. In this model, we're all working together as co shareholders of a fantastic opportunity. That was really exciting because my.

40 years of knowledge to make something incredible. And four months in, I'm not disappointed. I've had lots of great opportunities to make decisions and be fully accountable for those changes that I've made since I've joined, which is really refreshing. How has the responsibility of the IT leader in a law firm changed with the proliferation of ai?

AI is just a good thing to hang off of. How things have changed for the CIO and IT leaders over the last sort of 3, 4, 5 years, I think being much more attuned and in tune with the business and the business of law is table stakes now for, IT leaders. We saw quite a bit of bringing in outside of law IT leaders through the late sort of teens and into the early twenties because a lot of guys and girls inside the law business weren't really in tune with, how to understand and work as a business executive.

Really super good technologists, but maybe not a really good business executive. That's table stakes now for anybody. My view is you need to take that level of accountability as part of the executive team. You're not just the technologist who's going to deliver the ai.

You're the person who's gonna work with the executive team to understand the impact on people, the impact on process, the impact on profitability, how you actually can. Convert this into something that's billable and sellable. And I think that's the significant difference probably in the last three or four years. And AI really just shines a touch on that.

You really need to understand how can you turn that into something that the firm can market and sell and make profit on. Where do you see the practice of law headed? We have a lot of challenges in front of us. There is no doubt about it.

The uses of AI is really prolific. And that's. Only gonna become more commonplace. So the practice of law needs to evolve.

We need to add the value to our clients in a way that is demonstrable as to our expertise and knowledge and we need to be very clear around some of those more handle turning exercises. We need to be really efficient in them and make sure that the client understands all of these processes that maybe used to take. A day, two days, a week, a month, your know, due diligence, that type of thing. We've automated that.

We've put a set of guard, runs our intellectual property combined with AI or any technology is giving a better quality outcome. But we are. Working alongside that to ensure that quality level is at the same level as you would've expected if it was just a bunch of humans doing that work. We really do have to adopt that.

And the pace of change will increase, but it'll be more natural than hockey stick. I don't see. Everything collapse next year or in two years time or even five years time. Clients take time to absorb the change as well as us taking time to deliver that change, but that change is coming let's say by 2030 .

In four years time, it'll look radically different, and the billable hour might not be a thing in the past, but what you'll be billing on is in real expertise and real intelligence. You'll be very clear around those commoditized tools and those commoditized services and how you've used tools to really make them as valuable or as cost effective as you possibly can. This is Ari Kaplan speaking with Tony McKenna, the new Chief Information Officer at Law Front, a group of regional law firms focused on providing legal services in the uk.

Tony, thank you so very much and wishing you the very best of luck. Thank you very much, Ari. It's been great to chat to you. Thank you for listening to the Reinventing Professionals podcast.

Visit reinventingprofessionals.com or arikaplanadvisors.