A senior in-house lawyer at one of the world's largest technology companies recently told me she never uses the phone anymore, opting instead for video calls. Except, that is, when she talks to lawyers. She says they are the most antiquated people she deals with and that she can't understand why they find it so difficult to show themselves on camera. She also finds it frustrating that lawyers don't use WhatsApp or Google Docs like everyone else.

For her, this reticence to modernize makes a mockery of law firms' claims that they are making great strides in technology. And she is not the only skeptic.

One former global head of a large international firm says he thinks most legal tech initiatives are just hot air, while the London head of another global firm echoes such concerns, saying he has yet to see any meaningful way in which lawyers' working lives have been changed by legal tech.