We're back from New York where we attended this year's Legalweek event. With its new branding, this still feels like an event in transition, but with something like 6000 attendees from across the legal sector, it's clear that we now have the pandemic well and truly behind us, and we're really valuing the quality that comes from in-person interactions.


New York TowersOf course, Generative AI was at the heart of pretty much every discussion, with many firms leaning hard into their AI strategies. We were particularly taken by DLA Piper's Best Use of Artificial Intelligence award showcasing its blended approach, bringing together a range of disciplines from technology to policy to create a balanced set of services which address innovation, ethics and compliance.

"Artificial intelligence and automation are changing the way we do business. While the use of AI offers many benefits, it also presents a wide range of legal obligations and questions, especially in areas such as regulatory compliance, governance, public reporting, privacy and ethics."
https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/topics/artificial-intelligence

Alongside the main event, we took time to meet with our Legal Product Advisory Group to review our roadmap and new innovations in our 'made for legal' cloud-hosted data discovery service. At the heart of their concerns was their need for capabilities to scale up their efforts, so that they could better help their firms balance the opportunities and risks inherent in AI adoption. In common with all information governance professions we work with, they felt a responsibility to bring to the table analytics that would enable them to proactively target data risk hotspots and support practice groups in adopting best data practices for:

  • Compliance with outside counsel guidelines.
  • Adherence to data privacy and practice-specific regulation.
  • Efficient matter mobility.
  • The capture of precedent in line with the matter lifecycle.

These practices transcend legal discovery and are beyond the reach of generic data discovery services such as Microsoft's Purview because they need to address the firm's breadth of matter. With that in mind we're excited to be working with our Advisory Group experts to fill the gap. An information governance team armed with metrics about how matter is spread and used across practice groups will be perfectly positioned to play an important role in their firm's data and AI innovations.