Trial Lawyer View Podcast
Holly Cope

Holly Cope on why an AI strategy matters more than AI tools

Holly Cope left legal practice to work in legal technology and founded the Global AI Skills Summit after noticing how many lawyers wanted to understand AI and had nowhere sensible to learn it. Her argument is that the firms pulling ahead are not the ones buying more software, they are the ones deciding what they are trying to achieve before they buy anything.

The obstacle is cultural, not technical

Holly puts the biggest hurdle down to habit rather than capability. She points out that lawyers are creatures of habit, and that the lingering fear of being replaced misses what is actually happening, which is that firms using these tools will outpace firms that do not.

She remembers being resistant herself while still practising, mostly because she had no time to learn a new system and was already carrying a full workload. That is the honest version of most resistance inside a firm.

What firms are doing to make adoption stick

The firms making progress are not mandating anything. They are building environments where trying something new is safe and encouraged. Holly describes a large UK firm running internal sessions where lawyers show each other what they are using, which turns the whole thing social rather than compulsory.

Some are going further and letting junior associates spend a share of their billable time experimenting with AI, which rewards the behaviour instead of asking people to find the time somewhere. In a contingency practice the mechanism differs, but the principle holds, because the hours are finite either way.

Mid-sized firms have the advantage

Holly sees mid-sized firms as best placed to lead this. They have more resources than a small practice and far more agility than a global firm, where changing direction means moving something enormous. She compares the difference to a speedboat and an ocean liner.

The firm she rates highest is Simmons & Simmons, which has built its own internal AI capability and hired legal engineers to help lawyers use it properly, rather than buying tools off the shelf and hoping.

The part nobody is talking about

Holly raises a figure she has seen suggesting that somewhere in the region of 43% of firms are adopting AI with no strategy behind it, meaning no usage policy, no compliance thinking, no data protection position and no governance.

For a regulated industry that advises other people on exactly these questions, that is a difficult position to defend. Her expectation is that the next few years will bring cases where firms breached obligations because nobody wrote anything down. She puts it down to a lack of awareness rather than carelessness, since many treat AI as though it behaves like any other software when it does not.

The gap a policy is supposed to close

The risk is rarely the partners. It is that the receptionist, the admin team and the paralegals are all using these tools already, because everyone is, even if it is only to make an email read better.

Without a written policy there is no way to control what leaves the building. Anything typed into an open tool is a potential confidentiality problem, and in personal injury that often means health information. A firm that has set no parameters carries the liability for whatever happens next.

Where the human part still decides everything

Holly is clear that marketing a law firm still needs the human element, because these tools miss the register that matters. In personal injury especially, someone who has just been badly hurt needs to feel that the person on the other end understands the situation.

She learned that at sixteen, doing work experience at a personal injury firm and answering calls about catastrophic accidents, with almost no training beyond one instruction: make sure you sound like you understand. That is the part no tool has taken over.

We get into all of this on the episode. Watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.