It’s an industry that predates the Industrial Revolution, as well as one that we need on average every seven years. Today, we’re talking about automation in the legal industry.
In this episode, we interview Slater and Gordon Lawyers UK’s Jon Grainger, Chief Information Officer, and Dan Morton, Technology Director, about shaping the consumer experience in the legal industry with automation.
What we talked about:
- The evolution of digital disruption in the legal space
- Destructive automation vs. creative automation
- Automating self-service
- Digitizing the onboarding experience
- The roadmap for tech in law
For more information, head over to nexthink.com or LinkedIn to stay connected!
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Tom McGrath:
You’re listening to Digital Employee Experience: A Show for IT Change Makers. Let’s get in the show. Hello Change makers, welcome to the show. I’m Tom McGrath. On today’s episode, while Tim sadly can’t be with us, we do have two wonderful guests in Jon Grainger and Dan Morton, both of them from disruptive law firm, Slater and Gordon and recent recipients of a coveted CIO 100 award. Gentlemen, more welcome to the show both of you. It’s great to have you on.
Jon Grainger:
Great [00:00:30] to be here, Tom and I’m sorry about your colleague being poorly. I had listened to a few of the episodes and it’s [crosstalk 00:00:38].
Tom McGrath:
He was the one you wanted to actually talk to.
Jon Grainger:
Yeah, he was actually the person I wanted to speak to. Yeah, so.
Tom McGrath:
I completely feel that. I feel bad about it, but we can rest assured he’s fully vaccinated. He’s in no danger, he’s going to be okay.
Jon Grainger:
I wish him a speedy recovery.
Tom McGrath:
Quite right. Dan, great to have you on too, sir.
Dan Morton:
Thanks Tom. Yeah, it’s always nice to chat to you. So thanks for the invitation to join.
Tom McGrath:
My pleasure. [00:01:00] Listen, I love talking to you guys because I think for one of… for part of the reason anyway, is because in terms of digital disruption, the legal industry is a really, really interesting one. But also, I really think your team approach for workplace and technology in the workplace with the fullest possible amount of creativity and intelligence. So let’s start with you, Jon. You’re CIO at Slater and Gordon, please begin by telling us something about your background and where your outlook comes from.
Jon Grainger:
Sure. And Tom, I appreciate [00:01:30] that very kind observation you made there about us. I’m very proud of the team and everything we’re doing. First thing I’ll say before I talk a bit about, very briefly about my background is your point about the legal industry. It actually predates the industrial revolution. So the legal industry was in full flow before the first… the actual, the industrial revolution.
You pick up the literature now and we talk about our fourth industrial revolution. And I suppose, none of us are quite [00:02:00] old enough to be able to span that period of time, but be interested to see how much the industry really has changed from those early days. And as far as I’m concerned, so I’m in my fifth year in the legal sector, and prior to that, about 20 years in delivering and selling technology services. So really moving to the other side of the table. And my first opportunity was at a global law firm [00:02:30] in the corporate law space, and now I’m in Slater and Gordon, when we are the biggest consumer legal services company and extremely exciting time to be in that space.
Tom McGrath:
Indeed. And we’re going to come right back to that, but just to say hello to Dan again, quickly, first, right? You were already at Slater and Gordon, I recall Dan, when Jon joined and I know you’ve been a big part of the subsequent journey. But I wonder if you could just tell us something about that background on what that shift [00:03:00] has been like and how you’d characterize it?
Dan Morton:
Yeah, sure. Well, I suppose to set the scene, I’ve worked in service management roles within law firms for all of my career, not quite as far back as Jon talked about, but certainly 25 years in law firms in quite a lot of that change. And then just more recently, but before Jon joined, and the recent firms I’ve worked for, we always followed the ITIL framework and always use traditional service desk processes to manage demand in terms of incidents and requests. It’s just [00:03:30] always been an uphill struggle. And in the past, like most companies, we’ve never had enough resource for, to focus on problem management. So we always struggled to reduce the incident demand that could only really focus on getting our support team to work through tickets and just keeping our heads above water. So actually is when Jon arrived, we were able to take a different approach and we just have a much greater focus on automation, problem management and user experience.
And we’ve been able to get to a place where we can focus on more valuable [00:04:00] work rather than just manage a backlog within the support queue. So I suppose, just to give you a little bit more on that, the one of the key changes was moving from a service desk phone line and ticketing system to a tech bar approach, where instead of logging a ticket and waiting for a response or call back, or just waiting on hold for an analyst, instead you book a virtual tech bar session and it just allows you to get the right level of support at a time to suit you. The lawyers can do it whenever it suits them. It’s really, really working. We’ve got a great NPS score, net [00:04:30] promoter score. It’s very positive. It’s 86, which is great. And we’ve also introduced lots of automation to reduce the need for support. And this transformational shift to automation, problem management and tech bar started pretty much on day one when Jon arrived, but prior to that, it was almost absent. Some of that good stuff.
Tom McGrath:
Amazing and we’re going to drill down into some of that detail momentarily, but I’d like Jon, just to have a quick think about the legal industry at large. I mean, is it fair to say, I’m obviously commenting from a very external place, but compared [00:05:00] to some other industries, its kind of evolution of its digital disruption, if you will, is relatively young. And it’s, therefore, has the potential still for, for really, really enormous changes, is that accurate?
Jon Grainger:
Yes. Yeah. So again, just back to that point about the fact that the industry started before the industrial revolution. The other thing is it’s very much an industry that’s focused on the professional knowledge of fairness. And [00:05:30] the industry has really sort of centered around that, giving out that professional knowledge. And therefore, it is a human-centric industry where the expertise is provided by the human.
And I’m not saying that that’s not going to change in terms of having the requirement for really gifted and expert fairness, but the focus is going to change to be more around [00:06:00] the consumer experience. So if you look at the legal sector, a lot of law firms are also run by the professionals that also give out the advice. So the entire mindset is around, I would say maybe kind of be, at times a little bit introspective. And if you’re the lay person in the street, and typically we use a lawyer once every seven years. So most of us is [00:06:30] as regular consumers, it’s a complete mystery as to what will happen, what’s the process and all the rest of it. So when you go into that process as a consumer, there’s a huge, huge, huge opportunity to make that a completely different experience to what you get in the majority of interactions today. I am talking more around consumer experience, consumer legal services, but I think having got some experience [00:07:00] in the corporate space, I think it’s applicable across the whole sector.
Yeah, if you want to take a parallel to this, just think about when online e-commerce started and people saying, well, hang on a minute-
Tom McGrath:
Exactly.
Jon Grainger:
… nobody is going to substitute the experience for being in a shop to being online. And obviously, very early online portals, there was a stark comparison between that or being in a shop. And also our own terms of reference, our frame of reference was being inside a shop. That’s [00:07:30] what everyone… So clearly, we can look back now, that’s changed quite a bit, that’s happened, I think, is it fair to say?
Tom McGrath:
I think that’s fair to say.
Jon Grainger:
[crosstalk 00:07:40] thousand. I think that that really happened, yeah. And then the second one, you could… So maybe the lawyer would look at that and say, okay, that’s great job, but we’re different. We’re regulated people.
Tom McGrath:
Yeah, people like going to the shops, yeah.
Jon Grainger:
Yeah, and.
Tom McGrath:
I guess that’s wrong. It’s a joke [crosstalk 00:07:54].
Jon Grainger:
And actually, let’s be really clear, lockdown aside, there’s [00:08:00] still a big space for going to shops, yeah. So actually, it’s changed it, but it hasn’t removed shopping. So the lawyer might say, well, that’s all great job, but we’re regulated, we’re different. There are rules and there is compliance and there are things that we have to go through. Well, now we can just bring in online banking, the finance space. When was the last time anyone… Again, I have to kind of discount lockdown.
Tom McGrath:
Sure.
Jon Grainger:
But regardless of lockdown, who’s been in a branch or a bank?
Tom McGrath:
It’s a better… It’s [00:08:30] a closer analogy than shopping, I would say.
Jon Grainger:
Yeah, because of the regulatory side of things.
Tom McGrath:
Of course.
Jon Grainger:
So really, it’s a case of why isn’t the legal sector just running towards this. And I think it’s because it’s actually a very disruptive thing to do. And if you’re in a scenario where you don’t feel you need to have to do that, then you won’t. A lot of the way law firms are organized in [00:09:00] terms of partnerships, the governance structure might not lend itself to saying, hang on, guys, let’s turn things on their heads and deliver services differently. So that’s part of what we have at Slater and Gordon. There’s a huge dollop of tech in there, but on top of it is also the intent and the strategy to disrupt, and we’re pivoting around the consumer and what the consumer needs rather than what the lawyer wants. So [00:09:30] I suppose if someone said to me, productivity, the first thing I would think about would be automation and how smooth we can make the consumer journey work.
Whereas if you run the time back five years, when I first heard about productivity in the legal space, the first thing you would think about was how can I get the lawyers’ data run smoother? I mean, Dan, you’ve seen both sides, but do you know that sort of productivity that’s really centered at the lawyer rather than productivity that’s aimed at the consumer [00:10:00] and being able to go through a process. And Tom, before we… I don’t want to get people panicked that maybe this is just going to be a computer experience with no interaction. There’s some really important philosophies that you can take with automation. And broadly, you can go down the creative automation route, or you can go down the destructive automation route. Destructive automation is get rid of everyone’s jobs [00:10:30] and just have a computer running everything. I mean that’s isn’t going to be good for society.
It’s a bit of a dystopian future. Our shout line for tech, which I think you may have heard us discuss before is work anywhere, automate everything. And then the really important word at the end is word create. So we’re doing creative automation and the idea being that the lawyer can gradually transfer the work they do into the creative space, rather than in the micro-decisions and [00:11:00] they’re filling forms and the kind of the bureaucracy side of it. So we’re actually using our automation to create a much better experience for the consumer, but also maybe a bit more in line with what the lawyer was thinking when they did their degree. There’s more exciting element of the job. Does that make sense?
Tom McGrath:
It really does and would you see an analogy between the kind of future of a tech professional and the future of [00:11:30] a legal professional and the effect, the potential effect of creative automation on them both?
Jon Grainger:
Yes. Yeah. Really interesting. Because if you look at the essence of maybe what the essence of law is, is a series of rules or interpretations that you have to apply to a particular scenario, just at that very high level that’s very, very similar to the goal within automation and within technology. So [00:12:00] the key point is that there is still a very important demand for human interpretation creativity, but we’re able to perhaps spend more time on that side by doing the automation in the other areas. In fact, that’s what a lot of the research is saying, that automation will really push us all through a shift where in our week we’re going to be doing more of the slightly more intensive, creative stuff [00:12:30] than having that mix of some boring and then some creative.
Which is interesting in itself, because if we all think about the three of us on this call, there are moments in the week, I think, where some of us do like to do something that’s a little bit boring to have a space.
Tom McGrath:
Sure.
Jon Grainger:
So there’s all sorts of implications on how we work and where that will drive us to.
Tom McGrath:
And listen, I don’t know if this is going out there too far, [00:13:00] but could we almost go so far as to say that the law itself is a form of software? Just a thought.
Jon Grainger:
Yes. Yeah. And again, I have to be really absolutely clear to anyone who’s listening to this, that I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a legal specialist.
Tom McGrath:
This is not legal advice you’re about to hear.
Jon Grainger:
This is definitely not legal advice, but there is, I think in continental Europe, the way the legal framework works has to [00:13:30] get a bit more rule-based. So there’s a sort of a codification. I think it goes back to Napoleon. So this sort of codified law. And so you’ve just got elements of that, which could be interpreted quite literally. What you’ve got in the UK is a little bit based on sort of… It’s not as simple as this, but there are sort of cases and you look at precedents and you brought, draw those together to see if you can draw conclusions for an outcome.
And the difference being is, is that the tech is growing so quickly [00:14:00] that we’re going to get into the space of being able to use technology to look at similarities and patterns within precedents as well.
Tom McGrath:
That’s interesting.
Jon Grainger:
That’s not where we’re at at all, and there’s probably quite a lot of contemplation required before we go down that avenue. What we’re actually doing is what I’m calling micro decision-making or in sort of AI parlance, it’s called AAI, which is [00:14:30] applied AI. So this is where we can make small decisions on whether a case should proceed to the next step, should go from this point to this point, or whether, on a probability basis, we should have the human in the loop. The human in the loop is the point where the pattern that we’re seeing says actually this really does make sense to bring a lawyer in.
And if you look at the computer’s ability to [00:15:00] consistently look at patterns and make decisions, there’s a real strength there in automation that we don’t have as human beings, but then, you have the computer providing the pattern and then suggesting, and then the human can go in and use that experience. So, yeah, it’s quite a deep on this. So I don’t know how.
Tom McGrath:
We’ve plunged, haven’t we? This is great.
Jon Grainger:
Yeah. We just go straight for it, but yeah. I think it’s important because what we’re doing in tech, in the tech [00:15:30] teams and the teams that Dan runs and I run is, I’m a huge believer that we have to practice what we preach. And so in, what was I just saying, yeah, five days, seven days from now, we’re going live with a self-service portal for road traffic accident, minor injuries, but also the process can take you through with any kind of injury.
And then it will decide [00:16:00] whether you can continue in the sort of the online self-service model, or if it’s a more serious issue, you drop out to a lawyer to speak to. That’s something that we think is going to be a great experience for our customers. And so I’ve said to Dan if it’s good enough for our customers, then self-service and the automation we’re bringing there, we should absolutely be bringing inside because it’s a great point for everyone within Slater and Gordon to [00:16:30] experience how good self-service can be. And it’s, remember, it’s self service and automation and to bring us back into the kind of the… I was listening to one of your episodes as Tom, they said the Nexthink because the kind of the… And bring us into the Nexthink kind of space.
Tom McGrath:
That’s what we called.
Jon Grainger:
Yeah that’s what you guys said. So I would say I’m a Nexthinker from [crosstalk 00:16:55]-
Tom McGrath:
Happy to have you Jon.
Jon Grainger:
… I’m listening to your episodes. If it’s an application process, [00:17:00] require that.
Tom McGrath:
Give me an honorary Nexthink Jon.
Jon Grainger:
That prove much appreciated, but that is what allows us to… Your platform is allowing us to get those insights so that Dan’s folks, rather than working on the ready humdrum, logging incidents, speaking to the service desk, finding things buried in queues are actually straight into being booked at a time that’s convenient for the lawyer to discuss more like, how can I get more out of this [00:17:30] app? So it’s a direct mirror. Do you see what I mean?
Tom McGrath:
I really do.
Jon Grainger:
Well, then you could argue, lawyers would say automating in their space might be more complicated than automating in our space. I dispute that. Actually. I think there’s things that we do that are actually quite complex. And if you look at how the Nexthink platform is developing, the fact the relationships that infers the use of machine learning, et cetera, just shows you how far you can go. And yeah, [00:18:00] so it’s very, very exciting time to be in tech and to be in the legal space.
Tom McGrath:
Brilliant stuff, Jon, thanks for that. Dan let’s let’s drill in then into what one of your employees might experience. There’s different Slater and Gordon to another firm or just another industry, even. Starting with a present day onboarding experience. What stands out to you as potentially being quite novel and distinct in what they’d encounter?
Dan Morton:
[00:18:30] Okay. Well, I think we’re like most companies at the moment, our new hires join us and start working from home immediately. And there’s some challenges there, that we hadn’t really faced before. And again, historically, they would appear in the office, they’d have the desk setup, we’d have the computer ready, would have tested everything. And we would drop by in person on their first day and check that they’re having a good technology experience from the start. But the pandemic changed this, so we’re having to do all of that work virtually, [00:19:00] which means shipping out equipment that’s ready to go straight out of the box as soon as it arrives. And we do a virtual tech bar session with them to help ensure that everything’s okay from day one and they can be productive straight away. And actually in critically, we’re paying a lot of attention to how well people are connected at home, and it may sound obvious, but we’ve found that fiber broadband that are wired rather than a wifi connection really gives people that advantage.
So we have to add that consideration into the onboarding experience too. [00:19:30] But what’s great about it is that we used to hire people within commute distance of our offices. And obviously now we can recruit anyone from anywhere in the UK. And I suppose the only limitation is the quality of the broadband. But I suppose in addition to that, we’ve had to be a lot smarter in the way we set up our new starters in terms of access to various systems. It was always a very manual process to set up the various accounts they needed. And the support on the lists used to create every set of new accounts and configure them. And it would [00:20:00] take them hours. It was always prone to mistakes because it was so detailed and lengthy, and that resulted in issues for the end user down the line. And that experience was often impacted quite early in their journey with Slater and Gordon through technical issues due to the account creation.
So obviously, automates everything. We’ve automated around 90% of the new starter process, which saves an analyst time, eliminates that failure demand that’s generated by manual processes, and as Jon said, it gives the [00:20:30] IT analyst whose job used to be just mundanely setting up user accounts all day, every day. That’s gone, that work’s gone and they can focus on more interesting things. So that automation and the change that has had a positively or positive impact on the end user experience from day one, when you join the company.
Tom McGrath:
And let’s look at problem solving both in terms of, first of all, problems they might not even know about and how Slater and Gordon gets ahead of [00:21:00] issues rather than just waiting for them to become a problem.
Dan Morton:
Yeah, well, it’s a good point because again, with historical support processes, the end-user on the support, unless typically have to have a conversation on the phone about the technical issue. And obviously created a whole bunch of technical translation problems, misunderstandings, dead ends in the problem solving process, or the alternative was for someone to get physically in front of a PC [00:21:30] and the hands on a computer or a laptop to work through the issues with it. And that’s all quite hard to do remotely. So now we use telemetry data from the Nexthink service and the data provided by the Nexthink collector, we see evidence of the issues right there. And we can take action. We now, we don’t have to have that conversation that’s so prone to misunderstanding. We’ve got it in the data and saves huge amount of time.
Jon Grainger:
Sorry to interrupt Dan. I was just going to build on that. And it’s I think it’s really interesting that a lot of us had hunches [00:22:00] and intuition about what was wrong. And I put my hand up, I was one of them. And there’s nothing like a set of data to put you in your place. We all had to move into that remote mode. We have to work anywhere strategy before lockdown, but we were only really sort of just into it. We were fortunate. I think I said, Tom, the best time to do your IT strategy is three years ago. So we were well under way and we could take advantage of that. [00:22:30] But nonetheless, we went from six offices to 1800 micro offices. And a lot of us were sort of saying, what’s going on with this change? Is it related to that upgrade that we did? Is it this, is it that? Some really strong views as to what the problem was.
And like I said, the evidence, I don’t want to go on about wired versus wireless, but it is quite incredible how many things get sorted if you stick with a wired connection. Lawyers love it, [00:23:00] love evidence as well. And I think Thomas, we mentioned this before where someone said, can I… look Jon, I don’t believe, you, because I can watch Netflix at home. It’s absolutely no issue whatsoever. So we had to kind of bring in. We couldn’t just refer to the laws of physics, certainly that wasn’t enough, and to show the evidence and the correlations have been very powerful. And you stop apologizing, you can get on with things and make an actual tangible solution. [00:23:30] And it moves us all along because it moves us on into right.
Now, how are we going to become more connected? What’s the next area that you can work at. If you can’t get your remote services, that’s… Just stay in that mode. You won’t be able to have any kind of conversation with the business unless you get that cleared.
Tom McGrath:
We’ll move on to my next question, which is always one I look forward when I… look forward to asking when I do get to talk to you guys, which is what’s on the S and G roadmap for the next six months? What’s coming next?
Jon Grainger:
[00:24:00] Dan, do you want to go first?
Dan Morton:
I mean, I often find it’s easier for Jon to talk outwardly for the business and I inwardly for the IT team. I think for me, it’s the IT team, it’s escaping its bounds, where you’re not just working on technology experience. In fact, I do much of my work with a team that comprises HR, technology, facilities, data [00:24:30] compliance, internal comms, and we’re all working to provide a great workplace experience rather than just the technology one. And an example would be, I mentioned the sentiment analysis. The next thing, we can ask people how things are working on their computer, but what if we used it also to capture the sentiment for their feedback on the office environment, the general sense of how productive they feel in any given time.
So rather than just having IT analysts reacting to technology sentiment, you may eventually have HR analysts react into other emerging [00:25:00] workplace issues. But yeah, essentially we want to lead the way on technology service management, but also on enterprise service management. And we want to get shared services involved using similar technology like chatbots and tech bars and tech bots. These sorts of things would benefit all the teams, not just technology. So I think that’s my focus for the next half of the year. Yeah.
Jon Grainger:
Cool. And so what I would say is, the technology that’s coming [00:25:30] out isn’t slowing down, it’s getting more and more exciting. Absolutely everything connects with everything else. So we’ve got this kind of exponential growth of possibilities with tech. Then we’ve got a coming out of lockdown. So work anywhere, isn’t just work from home, which has been during lockdown. Is literally lots of different contexts, how to create a pop up conference session, how to work on the [00:26:00] move, how to be secure, this sort of augmented reality, being able to… Well, you can see some of it in the consumer platforms with Apple where you can look at the screen and it can project certain things that are contextual. There’s a huge amount, I think, coming out in micro decision-making. So it’s the sort of applied AI. And what we have to do is we’ve got to move the tech folks into that space because it’s putting [00:26:30] all those things together, we’re going to come up with some really interesting mixes of use of tech.
And that’s going to save our employees from having to work it out. The other thing is to move down the route of what’s called hyper-customization. So it’s the ability to give very tailored experiences to everyone, but do it in a way that’s very scalable. And so rather than just giving everyone, this is your desktop, and [00:27:00] you’re just going to have this set of applications, we’re able to provide something that’s much more customized, but in a way that we can still keep the integrity of the desktop and the performance and all the rest of that. There’s so much ahead of us in the tech side. I mean, how long are we going to carry on writing for?
When you look at the transcription services from just if any of you guys use Microsoft, and if you look at the [00:27:30] market statistics, it’s likely a lot of people listening do use Microsoft, but need the cloud version of word, for example, and its ability for dictation. It’s really powerful. And if I say Alexa, I said it quietly.
Tom McGrath:
She’s shy.
Jon Grainger:
I said it, yeah, so things didn’t go off. But if anyone’s got one of those consumer devices, it’s funny, isn’t it, how I start to whisper because [crosstalk 00:27:56]-
Tom McGrath:
She’s sleeping.
Jon Grainger:
… she’s sleeping, yeah. But [00:28:00] it’s so articulate for how you… So I can imagine one of those skills, I think, they’re called as a means of actually contacting us as a consumer law firm. And actually, if you can do that, then why can’t I ask you know who, because, I’m saying you know who because in the room to ask for a tech bar session. It’s [00:28:30] seriously so doable, but you can’t do it if you spend your life calling people up who can’t make phone calls and looking at queues and doing repetitive password resets. I started out my career early there was on the service desk. It wasn’t the Slater and Gordon service desk because it happens, but I was on a service desk and you learn a lot. But that sort of visceral experience about all the talk [00:29:00] and what is the actual experience going on? I think we’re in an amazing time for moving all that forward.
Tom McGrath:
Well, I think that’s a magnificent note to end on Jon. Guys it’s been a genuine joy to have you on the show. Thank you so much.
Jon Grainger:
Thanks, Tom. Really appreciate you spending the time with us and really enjoyed and enjoying a long catch up a little bit, but I’m working my way through the series, and it’s a very, very exciting [00:29:30] set of podcasts you put together.
Tom McGrath:
Thank you so much. Glad to hear it. Dan, great to speak to you as ever mate.
Dan Morton:
Thanks Tom. It’s been great. Thank you.
Tom McGrath:
Fantastic, guys. To make sure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, make sure to leave a rating of the show. Just tap the number of stars you think the podcast deserves. If you’d like to learn more about how Nexthink can help you improve your digital employee experience, head over to nexthink.com. Thank you so much for listening. Until [00:30:00] next time.
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