‘A firm like ours will never replace lawyers with AI' - but Goughs' IT chief has his ear to the ground

Like many legal firms, Goughs - a 130-staff family law, commercial, and property services outfit in Wiltshire, England - was pushed into urgent digital modernization during the pandemic.

But looking back, the man responsible for IT at the firm now thinks he should have moved faster and been bolder. Ross Phillips is a full-time lawyer who has, over the past few years, become increasingly convinced of the potential for technology in the SME legal context. He also acts as Partner in Charge of IT, working as closely as he can with his small IT team to realize the benefits of tech, AI, and automation.

With hindsight, he wishes he'd used the pandemic to embrace the cloud more decisively - and sought external advice on productivity improvements sooner.

A constant balancing act

That appetite for change has to be weighed, every day, against the naturally cautious mindset of the legal profession.

Phillips says:

Lawyers are naturally cautious, risk-averse people. Maybe I am less so - a bit more ready to give my CTO the reins and let him run with it. But we're a partnership and we need to make sure we're all moving at a pace that's right for us here.

That caution also explains why Goughs hasn't gone down the route of handing all IT responsibility to a third party.

He says:

For us, IT is not about revolutionizing the way in which we work but always about evolving gradually and making improvements along the way. Yes, some firms have shipped everything out, but to me, that's always fraught with risk. 

When I go to conferences and speak to IT partners and directors at other law firms, I hear more horror stories about how their transitions have gone than success stories.

Listening to staff before chasing the next shiny thing is a core discipline, he adds:

We look inwards to our staff and to our teams - we listen to what our lawyers and colleagues actually want or need before going on to the next big thing. There are a lot of vendors that would happily sell to us, but for an SME in any field, IT has to really add value and give bang for the buck.

A working, value-add tech stack

That slow-but-steady approach has allowed Phillips to build up what he sees as a Goughs-specific tech stack.

At its center is all-around IT support from a Managed Service Provider called etiCloud - from whose ranks he recently hired a new full-time CTO, Chris Myers. That's complemented by ongoing consultancy from Lights-On Consulting, a specialist legal IT firm that originally carried out a full review of the firm's systems, telephony, and infrastructure, and also surveyed how staff felt about technology.

Several legal workflow applications sit on top: case management system SOS, ID verification and property search portal InfoTrack, and more recently risk compliance tooling from Forsyte.

Phillips points to specific pain points that have been addressed. Anti-money laundering (AML) checks are a significant overhead in legal work.

He says:

We identified a piece of software in InfoTrack that makes the client onboarding journey a lot smoother. Now that we have electronic verification of ID and easy ways for clients to electronically sign agreements and upload documents at the start of a matter - particularly in conveyancing - it's made things much easier. 

We're also trialling a relatively new product we think will help with risk assessments and compliance policies.

Time recording is another area where AI is on the table, though Phillips is approaching it carefully. He says:

Lots of firms have enlisted different pieces of software involving AI bots - which means them watching what you're doing daily - sometimes helpfully, sometimes unhelpfully, suggesting ways to record your time. For now, we've decided not to go down that route and are instead looking at policies and training internally to improve our time recording.

'We don't have the vast budgets’

Understanding the balancing act requires understanding the firm's distinct market position. Many of Goughs' clients have long-standing relationships with the firm - in some cases spanning generations. Families and businesses, including farming operations, return for advice across a broad range of legal matters, from land and property to succession planning, family arrangements, and trusts.

That continuity matters, Phillips argues, and it shapes how he thinks about technology risk. Bigger firms may have deeper pockets and a more transactional client relationship - but Goughs doesn't. He says:

We don't have the vast budgets that larger corporations or enterprises do for things like developing bespoke AI bots or search and summarization functions. Instead, we need to keep our ear to the ground as to what's out there, what might suit us, and where the opportunities are.

That doesn't mean the firm isn't interested in AI's potential - far from it. But again, the balance between moving fast and getting solid value holds. He says:

Because we're not going after the really basic, high-volume work that the large 'factory law' brands do, a firm like ours will never replace lawyers with AI. All our lawyers are specialists, and we think clients would rather pay a person for the personal experience they've acquired on that legal journey. 

But at the same time, AI will replace certain mundane functions. Automated AI transcriptions of meetings and calls through Microsoft Teams are already better than the old-fashioned way lawyers used to dictate everything to their secretaries.

Summing up the opportunity for smaller firms, Phillips keeps it simple:

I don't believe there is any such thing as a perfect environment, but in a year's time I'd definitely want to be better informed about the SaaS-based and browser-based models and products that are out there. We will be moving to all that one day - but we're not rushing ahead. I've heard one too many stories of firms that have got it drastically wrong.