Tech wars rival talent wars in the law, says Thomson Reuters survey

Ramping up technology rivals the need to foster talent in Australian law firms’ priorities this year.

Gary Adler, chief digital officer at MinterEllison.

Ramping up technology rivals the need to foster talent in Australian law firms’ priorities this year.

These imperatives are only trumped by growing or retaining the client base and improving profitability, according to the Thomson Reuters Tech & the Law 2022 report that surveyed 826 lawyers in firms and corporate legal departments.

Hiring and retaining top talent in a competitive market remained the biggest challenge for legal firm respondents, who made up 80 per cent of the survey, ranging across large operations (17 per cent), mid-size (28 per cent) and small (55 per cent).

Of them, 59 per cent said digital investment had increased during the Covid lockdowns in a bid to produce efficiencies to shore up existing business and cultivate new clients.

The survey warned against taking a shortsighted approach.

“Innovation is often seen as a way for firms and legal practices to enhance client service and empower their lawyers to be more effective,” it said.

“However, firms who lack innovation may be at risk of losing talent to more innovative firms.”

Only 21 per cent said their firm or practice was highly innovative and 59 per cent described their firm as moderately innovative.

Of the 20 per cent who said their firm was “not innovative”, 29 per cent were prepared to resign if a better opportunity arose.

MinterEllison chief digital officer Gary Adler confirmed technology and talent were “interrelated”. “If you get the technology piece right, you can attract and retain some of the best talent because at the end of the day, you’re bringing people into a firm where technology can be used to remove a lot of those menial tasks and ultimately move people up the value chain if it’s done in the right way.”

Mr Adler has driven the firm’s big budget “digital destination” innovation program whose “hyper automation” he defines as knitting together a clutch of existing automation tools such as artificial intelligence (AI), workflow and service automation, and robotic process automation.

The integrated system improves work for everyone, a significant achievement given the survey identified the most common technological challenge was “slow, cumbersome and hard-to-use” platforms, followed by access issues when working remotely.

MinterEllison is among the big firms that had already embarked on digital transformation when Covid hit.

“Because of that we could pivot quickly,” Mr Adler said.

“We went from 200-300 people working from home pre-Covid to almost 3000 people in the space of 10 days.”

In the past three months they have begun using a homegrown program they call MAX, able to process millions of documents quickly, a crucial advantage when swamped with paperwork obtained via the discovery process in client litigation matters.

This is the kind of efficiency those in the other part of the survey, in-house corporate lawyers, are also seeking. Spread evenly across large, mid-size and boutique operations, a substantial 41 per cent also reported an investment boost in technology during the pandemic.

The need to optimise technology ranked fourth in challenges for this year, behind “keeping on top of (the) changing risk and reliance landscape”, minimising costs and proving the value of the legal department to the business.