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Thomson Reuters

Generate 2017 – Our inaugural customer summit

Lucia Sandin

26 Jun 2017

On 20 June, in some unusually tropical London heat, hundreds of lawyers, librarians, IT professionals and other legal professionals gathered at Central Hall in Westminster to network and learn about Thomson Reuters legal solutions. They were invited to share their thoughts on current topics including AI, cloud, automation and many more.

From the start, our Executive Leadership Team’s keynote put our work into context by highlighting the importance of legal professionals in these uncertain times. With this uncertainty, also comes a lot of opportunity, which has led to a hunger to do things better and differently. Legal teams are changing and innovating more than ever to service their clients in the best possible way.

The day consisted of talks from a range of experts in various areas of the legal and tech industries, including leading peer case studies. Three main topics ruled the day; the future of legal technology in general, stories ‘from the coalface’ of innovation, as well as practical and informative updates about our various legal solutions.

One of the latest buzz words in Legal has been AI, but what does it actually mean for legal professionals? We had Richard Tromans, Christie Guimond and Horia Selegean enlighten us by sharing their experiences with implementing variations of this tech in their respective organisations. The key take-away is that since the law is text and text is data, AI is a natural fit for legal work. And even though the real effect of implementing these technologies is unclear, for now, it makes the work of those involved more varied and enjoyable.

We heard from several of our customers about their successful projects with our solutions. First up was Jonathan Patterson from DWF, who ran an engaged session about how DWF approached the adoption of document automation with Contract Express. Crucial to their success was getting the right people involved, ensuring collaboration, thorough preparation and partnering with the team behind the technology.

The Practical Law, Westlaw and Lawtel product teams gave an overview of the past and future enhancements happening to our regulatory and guidance materials. We also saw the beginnings of the integration of Practical Law and Westlaw, a particularly sought after change. A deep-dive into the new Cross-border resource centre gave the audience a more practical insight into how they can use our know-how service to help them manage anti-corruption and bribery internationally. In our increasingly global and regulated business environment, this was particularly relevant to our audience.

It was great to hear our customers’ ideas and concerns throughout the day. Despite outside pressure from clients to change, many law firms and teams find it hard to do so. An example of this came up in our Solcara and Bulletin Pro sessions when a customer asked: “How do you deal with firms that want to keep spreadsheets and refuse to switch to an online system as it can be a time-consuming and confusing process?”. The answer from our Software Product Management team was that there will always be firms that prefer to keep spreadsheets and old systems because they’re used to it, but in those cases, the time wastage will eventually become harder and harder to justify.

Our customers certainly showed their hunger to change and improve the way they service their clients by coming to this all day event and engaging with us meaningfully in some very warm rooms! With all these opportunities ahead, ultimately, our customers wanted to know: “How can you help me tomorrow?”. The answer is that we are committed to work alongside them every step of the way.

 

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