Stuart Whittle

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).

Stuart Whittle is not unique, but he is unusual: a law firm partner who moved full time into IT and, since 2010, a member of Weightmans' management board. He now has more than a decade's experience as an innovative IT director at Weightmans. This dual perspective gives him a valuable understanding of what innovation means in practice.

His interest in IT started as a trainee solicitor: "The firm was acting on a huge class action for various law firms arising out of equity release mortgages," says Whittle. "Another firm presented us with a Microsoft Access 1995 database to help manage the litigation: beautifully crafted, but we couldn't get it to work for us.

"My IT partner said: do you know anything about IT? To which the answer was: not really. So he sent me on a lengthy Microsoft Access course – at the time, a radical thing to do. I then pulled this database apart and put it back together again. The frustration I've always had with the law is there are lots of right answers and you're never quite sure whether you've got the right one. In IT, it either works or it doesn't, or it works elegantly or it doesn't."

Whittle spent 10 years as a practising lawyer before moving full time into IT. "In my naive world as a lawyer, I was delivering services to clients: what I thought were the things the client wanted. When I got into IT – perspective is a wonderful thing – I quickly discovered that the suppliers I valued were those that knew more about my business than I did, the ones who understood I had a problem and made it go away."

Whittle ran the IT department for five years and then assumed responsibility for the firm's operational functions: marketing, HR, facilities, projects, risk and business processing engineering. After learning "some hard lessons in case management systems", he spent a year designing and rolling out basic workflows, making sure everybody in the firm was using the system. "We were early adopters of case management technology," he says.

If you can get a partner talking about how they've done something different for a client, that's what gets other partners interested

These internal systems have since progressed much further: "If the client wants to see management information that we collect," Whittle explains, "we can show them all the documents in the systems plus the financial information and aggregate it at a portfolio level." This is supplemented by providing clients with dashboards that help them derive meaning from the data.

Whittle has ensured that all systems have been fully integrated as a result of mergers by Weightmans. But being innovative for clients has been paramount: "The thing that drives lawyers is clients. Many of the changes we have introduced have been at the behest of a particular client. Having then used that in one area and shown that it works, we have rolled it out elsewhere."

His main challenge in being innovative? "Time. We don't lack great ideas but like many law firms, we are a victim: the urgent stuff always takes priority."

He is "genuinely interested" in what AI might do. "There's a lot of potential, particularly if you can do something with this huge corpus of information that my firm has: that combination of structured and unstructured data, to derive patterns and meaning from it and link that unstructured data to structured data. There is something very powerful there. But it's a big if."

Persuading lawyers to invest time (and money) is best done by results, as he explains: "By definition, lawyers are very good at telling you all the reasons why something won't work. Whatever you suggest isn't ever going to be perfect. But if you can get a partner talking about how they've done something different for a client, that's what gets other partners interested."