Richard Susskind. jpg-Article-201611091044

Legal Week Intelligence, in association with Fulcrum GT, recently published the first edition of its Top 20 Legal IT Innovators report, which profiles the law firm leaders, in-house lawyers and tech pioneers driving change in the legal profession.

Click here to download the report from Legal Week Law (free registration required).

Richard Susskind is a pivotal figure in legal technology. An acclaimed strategist and thinker, a distinguished academic (he holds professorships at Oxford and UCL among others), and author of nine influential books, Susskind has been an IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England & Wales for nearly 20 years. In 2000, he received an OBE for his services to IT in the law and to the Administration of Justice, and since 2011, he has been president of the Society for Computers and Law.

"I've really tried to influence thinking across the legal profession," he says. "I like to think I have influenced a generation of lawyers in their thinking about the profound impact of technology on law." After writing his Oxford doctorate on law and AI in the mid-1980s, he developed with Phillip Capper (now a White & Case partner), the world's first commercially available AI system in law (The Latent Damage System) in 1988.

Susskind's global reach is significant: his work has been translated into 12 languages and he has lectured in more than 40 countries. At a practical level, his influence has been equally widespread as an adviser to several of the world's leading law firms on issues relating to future strategy and their use of technology. He describes the relationships with these firms, such as Allen & Overy, as "longstanding, not occasional projects".

More than anything Susskind sees himself as a catalyst. "Fundamentally, my interest is: can computers solve legal problems?" he explains. "That's partly a technical question and partly a philosophical question." But his ideas and his thinking are entirely pragmatic.

My running theme is for the 2020s: it's not going to be a decade of unemployment but it will be a decade of redeployment; we've got to learn to work differently

"Law firms can think they are innovative because they are automating in an innovative way because no one has ever automated in that way before," he says. "But my more technical meaning of innovation is really bringing about change in the underlying process. As in so many sectors, lawyers are inclined to dress up their automation as innovation. They want to suggest that the use of technology to streamline the old ways of working is perhaps more adventurous than it really is."

As a legal disruptor, Susskind questions the way in which law firms see themselves as businesses and how they offer services to clients.

"I want to challenge lawyers to understand the potential technology and use it," he says, "not simply to preserve 20th century legal practice, but to redefine the way the legal professionals can help their clients. By legal professionals, I don't just mean traditional lawyers, I mean people who are legal technologists and legal process analysts and legal knowledge engineers. My running theme is for the 2020s: it's not going to be a decade of unemployment but it will be a decade of redeployment; we've got to learn to work differently."

Challenging the status quo – the established ways of thinking and doing things – makes some lawyers feel uncomfortable, particularly when part of what he advocates is "taking the cost out of legal service". Looking ahead, Susskind believes the "more for less" challenge will be critical: "It's going to define and underpin the way that we evolve our legal services. Technology is one of the key ways of allowing us to do the same or a better job than in the past but for a lower cost – that's the key."