Alex Smith is Reed Smith's former Innovation Hub manager, who has previously spent 17 years at LexisNexis in product development and platform innovation.

At Reed Smith, he managed the firm's Innovation Hub initiative aimed at facilitating collaboration between clients, lawyers and their contacts to discuss business opportunities and solutions. The hub was built in response to the firm's then-new initiative to enhance how Reed Smith works with clients. By 2018, Reed Smith took its development a step further by launching  legal tech company subsidiary GravityStack.

With experience creating legal tech and cultivating discussions around legal innovation at firms, Smith joins iManage RAVN as the tech company's new global product management lead, tasked with identifying in-house's difficulties and inefficiencies and developing technology to solve those challenges.

During a chat with Legaltech News, Smith discussed the ways in which to appeal software to attorneys, how legal tech companies can compete with law firms' developers, and what he thinks is the most exciting technology today. 

Smith's answers have been edited for clarity and length.

Legaltech News: How do you get lawyers to use technology in their practice?

Alex Smith: I think putting the technologies first is the mistake people make. I think [successful legal tech is] trying to understand workflow and the problems that those lawyers are dealing with and really trying to work on how technology fits within that people process.

Will law firm tech subsidiaries like Reed Smith's GravityStack mean competition for legal tech companies like RAVN?

Yes, but it depends on the type of approach legal tech companies take. If you are a one-size-fits-all product I think there's a danger there. But if you become the underline platform for those firms you are providing the heavyweight tools then firms won't necessarily have the drive to develop and maintain that level of technology.

I think that's where you'll see the larger tech companies have a place because I don't think firms will want to rebuild entire technology, but what they will do is configure it to what they are doing with clients. I'm not sure the larger tech companies will want to configure everything to meet every single market and sector out there. … They want to provide the platform and product to firms to build those and add their own modules.

I think that's why legal tech needs to be a bit bigger and grander and spend more time interacting with the client otherwise you may end up in competition with other firms.

What legal technology do you think corporate legal departments will use more often?

I think from the in-house perspective, they aren't really exciting technology [products]—we've had them for 10 years—but I definitely think we'll see a lot more document management, contract management, contract automation, etc.

If you say what is the interesting aspect, from my perspective, it is data and data analytics empowering people. Whether that's in-house counsel with analytics around what a team is doing or [around] contracts. Or perhaps with firms, building analytics about their clients, building knowledge management and sharing that with their organization. I think we are going to see a lot of data-sharing and data analytics coming though.

I think the boring aspect … is around collaboration and automation and filing data. The exciting part is if you get that right, you start to drive data analytics and that's what people are really after on the business side.

Is there anything else readers should know about legal tech?

What I've seen at my time at Reed Smith is when you empower lawyers with data, they are a very curious bunch. The challenge for legal tech companies is to deliver that big data in interesting and open ways so they can start to explore it. … I think often that data in legal tech has not been delivered brilliantly, therefore they have struggled. I think if you deliver that data interestingly, they are very curious and investigative.