From the President's Desk: Why lawyers can’t afford to stand still on tech...including the Journal

I’m delighted to be writing my first President’s column for the Journal.

Reading the Journal is such a vital part of keeping up to date with what is going on in the Scottish legal profession and has been throughout my career. When I first qualified in 2008 (it took me a while to convince myself I’ve been qualified for nearly 20 years!) a stack of Journals would arrive in the post once a month. We would diligently collect them from our pigeonholes and return to our offices for a lunchtime read.

Now, of course, we receive the Journal online – in our email inboxes and via other digital platforms such as LinkedIn. As you’ve hopefully seen, you can now also receive it in your ears as I’ve enjoyed adding the Journal to my Podcast rotation.

On social media I’m quite often confronted with posts saying things like “Please be kind to me – I am from the 1900s”. Most of our profession still are! As a result, I imagine many of us feel the pressure to keep up with technology, which can seem overwhelming. I am from that specific part of the 20^th Century where Hackers was my favourite move (it’s still in my top 10 - feel free to ask about the rest when we meet), so I’ve always enjoyed learning about and using technology.

I also like finding out what other people are doing to keep up with the changing face of technology. I appreciate that some of my colleagues in the profession still lament the loss of the paper Journal and wish things would just stop changing quite so quickly… if that describes your feelings, I’d like to hear from you as well!

The challenge is not only keeping up with technology we can use in our daily lives, but keeping up with the expectations of our clients, either external if we’re in private practice or internal for those of us in-house. For the Law Society and peer bodies around the world, there is also the tricky question of how to regulate lawyers effectively in a rapidly changing world of Artificial Intelligence.

Without the invention of electronic word processing, I think my career would have come to an early and grinding halt as my terrible spelling would have taken me out of the running for being a successful secretary, never mind a solicitor.

Personally, I’ve always tried to find the positives in change, including technological change. Voice recognition has come such a long way in my career – now digital transcription is almost perfect even with regional accents such as my own! Moving from paper files to digital filing systems has meant we can move seamlessly between our offices and work remotely.

The battle against the tide of email can feel relentless, but it also offers us the opportunity to quickly receive titles, searches, and communicate with our colleagues. Moving to electronic missives at my firm has required an investment in online signing technology, but means that no-one needs to roam the office on a Friday afternoon frantically trying to find me for the one signature that is preventing someone from collecting the keys for their new house! Instead, I can check and sign Qualified Electronic Signature (QES) missives quickly from wherever I am.

The data firms hold is a precious commodity and must be protected in the same way as the wills safe and title deeds store were before technology began to shrink them away as well. Regular staff training and health checks on your IT systems are as important as making sure wills went back in the safe in alphabetical order at the end of the week.

The use of AI is opening up a new and fascinating philosophical debate – if that is how you like to spend your time – as well opportunities for practical application and efficiency. Over my time as President, I hope to share a little bit more with you about my thoughts on the practical applications and associated regulation challenges. Those of you who’ve heard about my short-lived attempt to study philosophy will know that I’ll leave the philosophical debate to others.