Sam Dixon of Womble Bond Dickinson, The Evolving Role of Lawyers in the AI Era #341

CHAPTERS​

00:00 Introduction to Sam Dixon and Womblebond Dickinson

03:33 Focus on Restructuring in Commercial Law

06:17 Applications of AI in the Legal Profession

08:06 Overcoming Resistance to Innovation in Law Firms

09:56 Two-Tier Approach to Innovation

11:56 Deciding Between Buy and Build in AI Adoption

15:23 Impact of AI on Pricing and Billing in Law Firms

22:04 Exploring the Potential of Data Licensing

24:52 Parallels Between AI in Law and Music

28:09 The Changing Role of Lawyers in the AI Era

30:00 Using Generative AI as a Sounding Board

31:53 Book Recommendation: Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

TRANSCRIPT

sam-dixon-the-supercreativity-podcast-with-james-taylor_scp341-sam-dixon-full-video.txt
James Taylor (00:08)
Sam Dixon is the chief innovation officer of law firm Womble Bond Dickinson in the United Kingdom. He is also a practicing lawyer in the firm’s restructuring team. His innovation journey started in online retail in the early 2000s and has led him to law via a brief detour through the world of DJing. And if you don’t know Womble Bond Dickinson, I’m gonna put my hand up here. They are a client of mine. I’ve spoken to them for a number of times before. I think they have about a thousand.

lawyers in the US and the UK and they cover lots of different areas of business as well. And we’re going to be taking a deep dive into the work that Sam and his team do around innovation, specifically in the legal profession. So Sam, welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast.

Sam Dixon (00:50)
Good afternoon, James. Thank you for having me.

James Taylor (00:52)
So share with us just now what’s going on in your world, what currently has your focus at the moment?

Sam Dixon (00:57)
Well, I think it would be very difficult to give an answer other than generative AI, to be honest with you. It’s stormed onto the scene. We’re working our way through the hype cycle, of course. And it’s keeping us all very, very busy, both in terms of what we can do right now with it, but also what the future trajectory is going to be and where we might end up.

James Taylor (01:18)
And take, how did you get into this role? I mentioned that you’re obviously a practicing partner, you’re a solicitor, you do DJing as well. Tell us how this journey into the current role happened.

Sam Dixon (01:29)
Well, I’ve always had a bit of an interest in doing things differently and innovation and in the use of tech. Going back to, you mentioned the online retail at the start of my journey. And essentially for me, that was working in an outdoor equipment retailer in a shop and then ended up taking over their mail order business, turning that into an online retail business in the relatively early days of online retail and doing things like using AdWords and a computer.

a different way to how anyone has used them before. So we were targeting essentially a product comparison approach that no one else was using at the time. And fast forward in, sorry, go on James.

James Taylor (02:07)
I think, yeah, I was gonna say the move into the law. So you didn’t come initially from the legal profession then. You kind of, you were starting in e -commerce and retail first, and then you kind of, how did you find your way into the law?

Sam Dixon (02:22)
Well, in some respects, in a relatively conventional route, in the bit of online retail, and then I was doing a law degree. Now, being honest with you, whilst I was doing a law degree, I was doing quite a lot of DJing and event promotion, and I didn’t apply for a training contract two years ahead of time in the way that people normally do, because frankly, I thought I was going to be traveling the world DJing. And as I went into my final year, I had a number of offers to work in various parts of the world as a DJ.

But in my final year, we did real legal work. And I ended up dealing with a multiple conspiracy to murder case, so some gangland stuff. And it was fascinating. And at the same time, the firm I’m currently with, which at the time was called Dickinson Dees, prior to a number of mergers, they approached the university I was at and said, do you have anyone who might be interested in starting a training contract in a few months’ time? So I went in and had a chat. And one of the icebreaker questions was, do you know?

tell us something interesting about your week last week. So I explained that I’d DJed for an artist called Chesney Hawkes. It turned out the head of graduate recruitment was a massive Chesney Hawkes fan, and the rest, as they say, is history.

James Taylor (03:37)
So you went into, obviously, you started initially in the kind of legal side around criminal law. But my understanding is that one Bond Dickinson is known really for commercial law, and it’s that kind of world. And then you specifically, you focused on the restructuring side of things. So how did you get into that particular part of commercial law?

Sam Dixon (03:58)
Absolutely, well as you say it’s a commercial law firm so the criminal side of things was just part of my university experience. As soon as I joined what’s now Umubon Dickinson it was commercial law from the start and I started off as a trainee like all lawyers do and I rotated around a few different seats and being honest I didn’t know an awful lot about restructuring. I didn’t know what to expect but as I was going into my final seat it was in the height of the recession.

And there weren’t necessarily the opportunities in other areas that I would have perhaps liked to have done. And so someone gave me the chance to go and work in the restructuring team. And it turns out it was a really good fit for me. So I qualified into restructuring and insolvency and spent a number of years learning the ropes and really enjoying the restructuring sector, helping to try and save businesses and that kind of thing. But over time, I saw there were a number of things that we were doing in restructuring, which

I think it’s probably fair to describe as a bit boring at times. James form -filling, doing the same precedence again and again that he didn’t necessarily feel was the best way of doing it. There must have been a better way. And that got me to start looking at document automation. Originally using things which with hindsight look like quite archaic technology now and borderline kind of coding. Whereas,

things have evolved and it’s got easier and easier to do. But that first time that I saw a suite of documents that are automated, where in the past it would have taken hours to produce it, to then be able to just go out to answer a few questions and it’s going to tell me what documents I need. And it’s going to produce them all for me with all the associated paperwork. This is just amazing. And it was that that really was the trigger point for me gradually over time becoming more and more involved in our innovation.

efforts across the firm.

James Taylor (05:53)
I know with a lot of law firms I’ve worked with in the past, they initially got very excited about RPA, robotic process automation, taking some of those agreements, automating things to a certain extent. We’ve now moved from just doing that into obviously artificial intelligence and machine learning as well. When you’ve seen these technologies start to be applied in the work of law firms, where do you typically see it? Is it in document?

Is it being document management side? Is it looking at risk in relation to contracts? Is it helping lawyers draft agreements or something else?

Sam Dixon (06:31)
So I think it depends on the particular technology. But if you’re talking about that document automation side of things, that’s the production of documents very clearly. When you look at machine learning though, that’s usually around something like a document review. So that might be a due diligence exercise. It might be someone wanting to understand their range of contracts, whether it complies with their policies in a particular area. They might be trying to understand the lease portfolio and wanting to extract various bits of information across that portfolio because,

they’ve inherited it from someone else, it perhaps doesn’t have the level of detail and structure that they need. And that original transition machine learning tools worked to a degree to deliver that task. And there has been some success on that front. I think where it gets really interesting is that generative AI is able to do a lot of that work without the need for lots and lots of examples.

and the proactive work to train the particular machine learning tool to look for particular points of interest.

James Taylor (07:41)
Now your work obviously around innovation, a lot of law firms struggle around innovation because it’s traditionally the legal industry is one that’s focused on billable hours, your six minute increments or however long it is. And so everyone obviously partners associates very focused on those billable hours and to be able to take a step back and think actually, is there a better way of doing this or a smarter way, a more productive way of doing it? It’s often very difficult when people just focus on those billable hours. How did you…

to change the mindset within a firm, especially with those colleagues of yours who maybe said, we’ve been doing this for years, why do we have to change it?

Sam Dixon (08:20)