The Great Big Legal Offsite (GBLO) was held at Ribby Hall Village, Kirkham (near Preston) on 3 July 2024. I know that is now some seven months ago but the day job got in the way before I could, only recently, find the time to finish converting my notes from the conference into this blog post.

This new conference on the legal scene was the brainchild of Kate Burt of Hive Risk and Robert Hanna of KC Partners.

There are a lot of legal conferences that take place in the UK with new ones being added to the list every year. It can become difficult to know which ones to go to as you must be selective. I was immediately attracted to the Conference programme. A plus point was that it wasn’t as far to travel to from Glasgow than it is to travel to London (where most of the conferences take place).

I decided that the venue looked like a good location to spend a day or two beforehand offsite writing a book (more about that when I finish it!).

The Venue and the Bentley

I stayed in the Spa Hotel at Ribby Village which is very comfortable with excellent service and delicious food. They even have a Bentley to ferry guests from the hotel to other parts of the village including the conference venue. I didn’t indulge in that luxury but got my steps up instead. I know other delegates who did so though.

Kate invited me to visit her offices at Ribby Village where I met Robert Hannah for the first time. We, as Kate put it on LinkedIn, were “together waxing lyrical about all things legal tech, legal process and legal reforms”. Although, when I told them I would probably write a review of the GBLO they suddenly both looked terrified 😊

VIP

As I was offsite (or was I now onsite?) early, Kate kindly invited me to the VIP dinner (sponsored by etiCloud) the night before the GBLO. This was an enjoyable evening of good food, drink, chat and laughs with friends old and new. The mushroom soup seemed to be particularly highlight for many.

The next day and it was time for the GBLO.

I arrived (on foot rather than in the Bentley) to join a long queue for tea/coffee. A Suggestion for next year (there are already plans for a GBLO in 2025 – more about that at the end of this post) would be to have at least another table for teas/coffees (like they had for lunch). Also add some herbal/fruit teas to the mix, even if that is just for me.

Unplug today to Plug-in tomorrow

An introduction from Robert and Kate included Kate telling us why she thought their tagline “Unplug today to Plug-in tomorrow” didn’t justify legal action for non-attribution by its creator Michael Burne. This was a very last minute inclusion to the programme by Kate after jokes the night before by Michael Burne about the pop-up banners and mugs that displayed the tagline but didn’t include any attribution. He jokingly threatened to employ me to sue the GBLO in Scotland! Kate produced evidence (by way of LinkedIn exchanges with Michael) to show his consent to the tagline being used by GBLO. In the process Michael’s case crumbled but he got all the attribution and more that he might ever have craved.

Speaking about plugging in and out, I would take this opportunity to plug the fact that lawyers (especially but not exclusively Scottish ones) can, of course, do plug and play law with my law firm, Inksters 😉

The Billable Hour

Shaun Jardine, with Declan his trusty Penguin in tow, told the GBLO to put prices up if you want to make more money.

But Shaun would prefer you not to do this with your 6 minute unit price but instead do that via value pricing.

Shaun considers that it is output that is important to a client not input. He gave several examples including making an appointment for root canal treatment. If you were told you could either have it done in 30 minutes or 4 hours it is quite likely that you would agree to pay more for the 30 minute option.

We had, I think he said, 97 slides on the topic of value pricing which Shaun sped through in 25 minutes finishing bang on time. My note taking couldn’t keep up with him. If you are interested in value pricing Shaun has written a book, ‘Ditch the Billable Hour’ that you can purchase via Amazon or, I would think, via other good booksellers.

Shaun appears (unlike me) to be a big fan of ChatGPT. He says it is changing the world. Quoting Susskind (always a dangerous thing to do) he said it would be 300,000 times better in 5 years’ time. I would suggest that we shouldn’t count the holes in the wall until the drill gets to work on it.

Lawtech and the Billable Hour

The evening of the GBLO, Shaun posted on LinkedIn a link to an article in The Times about Lawtech coming (I thought that arrived a long time ago!) which refences the billable hour:

The elephant in the room, as more work gets automated, is will it sound the death knell for the traditional model of billing clients in six minute chunks? One senior lawyer said “billable hours” were already starting to be phased out and, at this rate, could be dead in months rather than years.

Shaun admits that he is:

not sure about months… but it certainly shows a direction of travel.

I think it is perhaps a sloth (not even a penguin, like Shaun’s Declan) that is doing the traveling. There is no Law Tech currently available, or anywhere to be seen, that is realistically going to have that sort of affect on the billable hour in years, never mind months, to come.

The Advance of Legal Technology

I trust Alex Holt, Chief Revenue Officer at The Cashroom, had his tongue in cheek at the GBLO when he suggested that 30 years ago lawyers were using parchment and gaslight!

I was practising law 30 years ago with a computer and electricity.

Mention of pink and blue slips for cash room purposes did bring back memories but were they maybe pink and green (or was it yellow) rather than blue in the firm I first worked in?

Alex suggested there should be  a move away from e-mail. I can’t see that happening anytime soon!

Just before the GBLO a solicitor asked me to communicate with them using their own case management portal. I received set-up/log-in details and after a bit of performance setting up passwords, using two factor authentication and eventually logging in I found a one sentence e-mail that warranted a two finger response.

It was ridiculous. If I responded using their system neither their e-mail nor my reply would be recorded on my own firm’s case management system. There may be benefits of them using the system to communicate with their clients but clearly not with other solicitors. It was technology for the sake of technology and not very good technology at that. Anyone who has been asked to use Egress (this was not that) will know what I mean.

I told the other solicitor what I thought of it and we reverted to good old fashioned e-mail.

75% of law firms experienced some form of cyber attack last year. Many of these do come via e-mail. But we probably need to find better solutions than portals that benefit one party over the other.

Chatbots

Alex referred to chatbots that don’t answer the question. We have all experienced that!

Don’t be afraid to change, Alex told us. I would agree but it shouldn’t be change for the sake of change without clear benefits for the person changing.

Not enough credit is often given (no suggestion from me that Alex thought so) for solicitors changing (even if their pace is sometimes slow). I’ve blogged about that before: Hack the Past: How the Legal Profession knew nothing about Technology.

I’m a law firm owner, Get me out of here!

Michael Burne of GBLO tagline fame (‘Unplug today to Plug-in tomorrow’) is a self-confessed builder of Arks. An Ark being a metaphor for a plan. Michael is the founder and CEO of Carbon Law Partners and Bamboo.

Michael considers that there are two important questions that we all need to answer:

Who are you?

What do you want?

Michael, as we already know, is a builder of Arks.

He doesn’t want a homogenised community all looking the same.

There were 11,000 law firms in England & Wales in 2016.

Today there are 9,287 law firms and that number is falling.

You need to know who you are and what you want as a law firm owner/leader.

This will enable you to attract/repel the right staff, clients, suppliers and successors/buyers of your firm.

Who are you? What do you want?

GBLO Q&A with Shaun, Alex and Michael

Artificial Intelligence

The first three GBLO speakers were asked about AI in law (that didn’t take long!)

Shaun Jardine said AI embedded in conveyancing would make time recording redundant. But surely conveyancers charge fixed fees and don’t time record? AI is going to make no difference to that and what, exactly, will the AI do in the conveyancing process that existing legal technology cannot do?

Shaun told us that everyone is setting up an AI firm. Are they?

We are to be curious. Play with it. Get it on your phones. Prepare an employment contract for your role.

I agree, no harm in playing with it but do try and work out where it might usefully benefit your law firm and if there is existing technology that might actually perform that task better and without hallucinations.

Alex Holt thought AI would be used to create wills. Most straightforward wills are templated as it is. I can’t see AI adding much, if anything, to that. Again, existing document automation can be used very well on this front. If complex requirements are required there will have to be, in my opinion,  human lawyers involved taking instructions and drafting (no doubt using clauses from existing style banks).

Michael Burne was more guarded when he said he “didn’t know how profound AI will be”.

Risk & Compliance

Next question from the floor was that the mid-sized law firms has been turned on its head. They are not prepared for change and the pressures of risk and compliance. Is the profession putting enough effort into training?

Alex Holt said when training as a lawyer from degree to diploma there was nothing around running a business. Nothing about the efficiencies of running a business. That was true back in my day doing the Diploma in Legal Practice in Scotland.

Things have however changed somewhat, as I know as a one time tutor in Commercial Awareness on the Diploma in Legal practice at the University of Glasgow.

However, only so much can be covered in that course and from memory there was perhaps more emphasis on ethics than risk and compliance. It is a few years since I last tutored though and that may have changed with the ever increasing importance placed by our regulators on risk and compliance. If not it should have. What, though, the position might be in England & Wales, I have no idea.

The SRA

Michael Burne said he wanted the SRA to be the most respected regulator in the world. He wants it to mean something. Michael wants a tattoo of the SRA [that raised a round of laughter]. He wants them to work with the profession.

The message that came across from the panel and from the floor was that currently no one thought the SRA was doing any of the things that Michael wanted them to aspire to. Soundbites included:

• SRA have lost a lot of respect
• Embarrassed with how the SRA are acting at the moment.
• SRA are fiddling whilst Rome burns.
• SRA are picking the wrong things.

The Law Society of Scotland

I could relate to what was being said about the SRA when thinking about our Scottish regulator, The Law Society of Scotland. I have previously blogged and spoken publicly about the inspection process in Scotland being:

unduly slow, cumbersome and unnecessarily adversarial. The inspection staff hallucinate in a way that would put ChatGPT to shame. They make assumptions that bear no resemblance to reality. Statements made by the practice unit are twisted and turned into something that was never said or meant. No real help or assistance is on offer.

A viewpoint that I am, unfortunately, hearing repeated more often than not by other Scottish solicitors. I cannot see any of them getting a Law Society of Scotland tattoo anytime soon!

Making the over-industrialised legal sector a thing of the past

Kush Birdi is the co-founder, along with his wife, Leena Birdi, of the London based law firm, Birdi & Co. Kushi described the firm as a ‘boutique’ with a team of seven that was formed in 2021.

Kushi stressed the importance of customer service in running a law firm. He said that there are so many examples of bad service in legal.

Getting the job done is not enough anymore. Clients want a personalised service along the way.

Quoting from the Legal 500, Kush said:

Clients want genuine ownership of the relationship by the partner and the team. When firms get bigger, people may think it’s just an institutional relationship, but clients still really want personal care. They want dialogue in between matters. Lawyers must not disappear because their transaction has ended.

And from Thomson Reuters:

…reputation is no longer the differentiator it once was – personal contact is now the primary driver.

Just a Number?

Kush suggested that clients often feel just like a number and we need to bring the human element to legal practice.

You have to get back to a client within 48 hours, otherwise you are not promptly available to them.

We need less industrialisation and more personalisation. Law firms can become too focused on standard procedures and rigid structures, treating clients just like another number and overlooking the personal touch and genuine enthusiasm.

High quality work is a given. We need to upgrade our attitude:

It’s our attitude, not our aptitude, that will determine our altitude.

AI

Kush then turned to the hot topic of the day: AI.

Kush quite rightly said that AI can’t deliver genuine empathy or conversation with clients. However, he then suggested that it can free up time to allow lawyers to use human conversation. I would caution, however, that following Inkster’s Law there may not currently be that freeing up of time. In my view, law firms should look first at properly implementing traditional technology  that is probably already sitting in their office underutilised (e.g. case management and document automation) before getting distracted by shiny new toys. They could free up a lot of time if they did that. AI just might not do it for them.

Kush concluded that law firms that don’t adopt AI will fall behind. This to me seemed somewhat at odds with ‘making the over-industrialised legal sector a thing of the past’ . However, again my message would be somewhat different. I would say that those law firms that maximise the use of existing technology within their law firms before they turn their attention to AI will fall less behind than those that don’t. At the moment AI can’t replace that existing technology. It is not magic.

Mental Health & Wellbeing Insights

Jodie Hill, founder of Thrive Law, gave us her insights on mental health & wellbeing.

Jodie thinks that you should be allowed to work smart: where and when you think it is best.

Her firm has mental health risk assessments giving a self-care report on each team member’s mental health.

Wellbeing days are given as paid days off to make team members take that time.

Special efforts are made by the firm to celebrate birthdays.

Innovation days are held.

Every member of the team has a voice about how they can do things better.

Dick’s are not tolerated. Thrive Law believes in:

Mutual respect always. We won’t expect you to work for someone else who is being a dick; you don’t have to deal with that on your own, or at all.

Wellbeing in the Workplace

The wellbeing theme continued with Ian McCann, CEO of Legal Studio, discussing wellbeing in the workplace.

Legal Studio, like my own law firm, Inksters, and like Carbon Partners (whose CEO, Michael Burne, spoke earlier), is a consultancy model law firm. So I could resonate with much of what Ian said.

Ian told us that happiness is the key to everything.

Depression is a symptom, not the cause.

A happy worker is 13% more productive.

Happy lawyers equal better lawyers.

Legal Studio restored Ian’s faith in life. It gave him financial freedom and flexibility.

You need to know your purpose. What makes you / your law firm stand out?

As Michael Burne said earlier, you need to know what you are and what you do. Then you need to know if your people really are your people. You need to police that.

People have lives/challenges and are human. They need autonomy.

Echoing what Jodie Hill said earlier, Ian also says “don’t be a dick” and “don’t tolerate them either”.

However, you have to be a realistic: some parts of work will suck.

Ian concluded by saying again, “happiness is the key to everything”.

Bringing about Growth

Dana Denis-Smith, founder of Obelisk Support, discussed bringing about growth in law firms.

Dana was seeing too many women leaving big law firms to become mums at home. She formed Obelisk Support to employ them and outsource them.

Reality hits with your first client.

You should never quit learning. You should reflect on what leadership is.

Most days are some kind of hell! You can learn from it.

Dana cautioned that building a business is not easy. You will have setbacks from day one and will continue to have setbacks, challenges, questions at least once a day. Diplomatic discussions will take place every day.

However, by maintaining her initial gustiness, Dana now has a multimillion pound business.

She is now spending 90% of her time on her big hairy audacious goal (BHAG) to have an x million pound business in 5 years. And that x is a big number.

If you can’t define your goal then you can’t know where the business is going.

You can’t make it without structure.

You need to have a growth engine. That is not you.

This, I recognised, as being the mantra of Michael Gerber in ‘The E-Myth’, where he says that you need to work on the business and not in it. Something that many law firm owners find difficult to achieve. Especially in a traditional partnership structure where the partners are expected to be fee-earners as well as the owners.

You need guts. Name your BHAG. Make it bigger than you can imagine.

I was left thinking that my BHAGs are perhaps not as big as they should be. I will now start to make them bigger!

GBLO Q&A with Kush, Jodie, Ian and Dana

What level of mentorship is necessary?

In this Q&A session the panel were asked about mentoring.

Most referenced working with business coaches to help them (and they don’t have to be a lawyer). Also spending time with other law firm leaders. I can relate to both of these being very important in the growth of my own law firm, Inksters.

SRA and Wellbeing

A discussion took place around the SRA and wellbeing. It was suggested that if the SRA are expecting lawyers to apply wellbeing then they need to do likewise. It was suggested that it is perhaps more likely that the SRA are going to kill someone through how they deal with inspections. Their over regulation leads to paralysis.

Practical Risk Management

Colin Taylor, of Howden Insurance Brokers, took us through practical risk management.

His main points were:

• Ensure supervision where required
• There is less control post the introduction of e-mail where partners cannot see everything that is going on.
• Juniors must know to come to you with issues.
• Make good e-mails and notes of what went on and record it on the file. Not one like this:

Colin pointed out that the falsification of documents is the second largest queue at the SRA. The first  one is badly behaving male lawyers.

The AI-assisted Organisation

The topic of AI had largely (other than by Kush Birdi) been ignored in the afternoon sessions. That was all about to change with the arrival of Piers Linney as Headline Speaker to round the conference off.

Piers Linney is a former Dragon from the BBC’s ‘Dragons’ Den’. He now has an AI company, Implement AI. This wasn’t the first legal conference I had attended where a Dragon had been keynoting.

Piers says we are in an AI assisted era.

We are seeing exponential change. It started with, will it kill me? Now it is, how do I make money from it?

Piers pointed out that AI today is AI and not AGI. He didn’t, however, draw a distinction between AI and GenAI.

Piers is of the view that in two to five years most human tasks will be augmented.

In five to 10 years we will have them moving around. Piers, however, thought that those robots may not help lawyers so much, other than perhaps making them a cup of tea.

Piers says this is a massive change and a bigger opportunity than the Internet.

AI Today is the worst it is ever going to be.

I wondered if that was not true 10 years ago and it is still not what we were promised?

In one to two years we will see infinite context. It will replace jobs.

Sins being committed?

The Seven deadly sins of AI predictions came to my mind at this point!

The introduction is like an autonomous vehicle, one stage at a time.

I was thinking how slow the introduction of autonomous vehicles have actually been. We still have a long way to go, it would appear, to have fully autonomous vehicles driving on all of our roads.

Piers predicts that humans answering calls in call centres (especially at low level) will be totally automated by AI.

I was thinking, no thanks!

Piers said that you have to get on the curve. If it gets away from you then you will never catch up. This ship is leaving the harbour. The law firms that will thrive will be those that embrace it now and don’t get left behind.

Again, my view is that lawyers will not be particularly left behind by waiting to see how AI actually develops in legal practice. Rather than being distracted by playing with a shiny new toy now they would be better placed concentrating on how best to enhance and progress their law firms with proven and tested technologies that can definitely create efficiencies for them. Once they have achieved that they may wish to consider where a more highly developed AI offering than Chat GPT might fit into the mix. And along the way they will probably find that some of that existing tech is already using AI to varying degrees.

Q&A with Piers Linney

Following his presentation, Piers Linney had a Q&A session hosted by Sahar Farooq of Harneys.

A discussion took place around what AI can do.

It was suggested that it will augment human labour but not replace it.

Large law firms are spending millions of pounds on technology. Now there is an opportunity for SMEs to automate a lot of things today.

There was, however, no discussion on actual use cases. The fact that law firms, including very small law firms, have been able to automate a lot of things they do via good old fashioned document automation was never mentioned. Nor was the fact that such old fashioned document automation might be more consistent and accurate than using AI.

It was recognised that AI today does not learn. But eventually it will apparently learn. No time scale was suggested for this. Although, later on it was suggested that AGI might be 20 years out. No need then for most lawyers to worry unduly today or tomorrow after all!

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I was reminded of the words of Douglas Adams, that Alex G. Smith has highlighted on LinkedIn, with Deep Thought saying:

“but the programme will take me a little while to run”

Fook glanced impatiently at his watch.

“How long?” he said.

“Seven and a half million years,” said Deep Thought.

Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other.

“Seven and a half million years … !” They cried in chorus.

“Yes,” declaimed Deep Thought, “I said I’d have to think about it, didn’t I? And it occurs to me that running a programme like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole area of philosophy in general. Everyone’s going to have their own theories about what answer I’m eventually going to come up with, and who better to capitalise on that media market then you yourselves? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and slagging each other off in the popular press, and so long as you have clever agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?”

The two philosophers gaped at him.

“Bloody hell,” said Majikthise, “now that is what I call thinking. Here Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?”

“Dunno,” said Vroomfondel in an awed whisper, “think our brains must be too highly trained Majikthise.”

So saying, they turned on their heels and walked out of the door and into a lifestyle beyond their wildest dreams.

Thoughts on the GBLO

The Great Big Legal Offsite had the attributes that make a good legal conference. Actual real legal practitioners and law firm owners telling us what it really is like from the coal face. Also the people that you meet around the edges that make a conference worthwhile to attend.

It, however, fell afoul, of what affects many legal conferences today, in having too much AI hype and little in the way of speakers to counter that. Hopefully, the 2025 conference will address that problem.

That 2025 conference takes place on 3 July 2025, again at Ribby Hall Village, Kirkham. Get your early bird tickets (special discounted price if you purchase by 31 March 2025) now via The Great Big Legal Offsite

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