The Next Gen-AI-Eration of Legal Talent

It has got me musing on our interim resourcing business and the value proposition.

Konexo has been a leader in the interim resourcing market for well over a decade with an enviable client and consultant roster. This has not happened by accident but has required consistent strategic encouragement with a willingness to adapt with the market, and an obsessive focus on delivery excellence through each aspect of the process. The fundamental requirement remains of course providing great quality consultants to our clients, matching closely our clients’ requirements for the relevant roles. A differentiator is the support we build in from Eversheds Sutherland partners in testing the technical excellence of legal consultants and technical subject matter fit plus PQE (post qualification experience) in years remain the key touchstones in providing that match.

This brings me back to my time spent with Copilot and what Generative AI may mean here. While legal technology has been of growing importance for many years it has largely felt incremental, but this now feels different. To me, it has the potential to drive seismic change to how legal advice is delivered and I know many of our clients are turning serious attention to this. Lawyers of the future conversations are no longer that. It is about having fit for purpose lawyers now.

The knock on effect for an interim resourcing business is to establish quickly what this means and factor this into the process of providing the right lawyers for the right roles. While legal technology can speed up and improve the traditional matching criteria, I would argue that these potentially become a little less relevant as advanced legal technology provides greater flexibility in technical area of expertise and level. The quality of its output can potentially lead to juniorization of certain roles where the task may move to checking and validation rather than origination of legal analysis (of course assuming that there are still enough junior lawyers and those junior lawyers have still needed to develop these skills otherwise this will require re-calibration again!). Conversely, if the focus is squarely on application and broader communication, it may become more possible to hone in on identifying those skills even if the core legal technical skills are a less precise match than previously required. Taking this analysis a step further and accepting that the potentially suitable pool of lawyers for a particular role is broader, this may allow us to address with renewed vigor that often elusive “cultural fit”. While currently there is a school of thought that this matters less in the interim market, I would argue that it is often critically important as our interim lawyers need to operate effectively quickly and are often in a position of influence. They do not have the luxury of learning or adapting to a new culture. I see a shift here to a more rigorous focus with our consultants at interview stage on deeper aspects of personality and drivers – with values and preferences questions and activities overlain by concrete examples of behaviors (an entry level lawyer psychoanalysis if you like). In parallel, we will see a more sophisticated client scoping where these aspects are more much clearly drawn out. This will allow more informed and holistic matches made. It will raise the bar for what it means to be a successful interim lawyer and provide confidence and resilience for clients in adopting this as part of a flexible operating model for the inhouse legal team, which is ultimately our value proposition.

Finally, I can say this short article has not been written by Copilot. Whether it has had a very small part to play I will not be sharing…