Spotlight on legal technologists – Q&A with Tilak Jagatia

In this series, Spotlight on legal technologists, we speak to members of the team about their role and hear their views on technology in the legal industry. 

Tilak you've been with Ashurst Advance for over 18 months now, can you give us a bit of background on how you came to find yourself in this role and the most interesting task you've worked on to date?

Studying and working within law definitely helped me to develop a good understanding of the challenges facing lawyers, their practices and their clients. It also enabled me to really hone my problem solving skills in response to these challenges. I've also always maintained an interest in technology, so it was probably inevitable that I would combine my legal experience and digital interests to follow a career in legal technology.

When I first started working in law as a paralegal (which seems like an eternity ago now), technology was limited to routine IT systems, services and support, and had not properly developed into the broader LegalTech industry that we know today.

My interest in combining law and technology to create solutions to real challenges came at a good time, as it coincided with an increased focus within law firms to find ways to digitally optimize their legal service delivery offering. This presented the perfect opportunity for me, as it allowed me to get creative and think outside of the box to design and build innovative tech-driven solutions to meet this new imperative. The legal market was finally responding to the new legal landscape and I wanted to join the journey and help shape the future of legal practice.

The most interesting task to date is one that saw the Digital Services team engage with our internal development team to design, build and deploy an in-house solution that leveraged Azure Logic Apps from Microsoft, in conjunction with APIs from several of our digital tools, to streamline a large repapering exercise. This collaborative approach really changed our approach and mindset when it came to the art of the possible. Ashurst and other law firms have an abundance of technical resource at their fingertips within the IT team and we are really capitalising on this to create differentiated digital services and solutions.

Legal technologists are still regarded as non-traditional fee earning roles within the legal industry. Can you tell us a bit more about the legal technologist role within Ashurst and how you interact with the wider firm?

Thankfully, within Ashurst the legal technologist role is increasingly being seen as the "new traditional", particularly for certain teams such as our banking practice where the Digital Services team is very ingrained.

Ashurst do things differently with regards to client service delivery. Ashurst Advance was set up as our NewLaw division to transform the way we deliver our matters for clients. It is its own distinct division and is recognised throughout the firm for its capabilities – ranging from alternative resourcing and legal project management to process improvement and legal technology. The firm has really embraced this new division, with one result being that everyone is much more familiar with our digital offering and is keen to deploy technology to improve their matters.

It's really fascinating how things have changed over the last few years when it comes to legal technology. What strikes me most now is how integrated technology is from the outset of a matter. As a legal technologist, I've been providing advice to clients, participating in pitch responses and designing technology solutions for clients directly. Our involvement in legal matters is as normal as that of any lawyer or business development manager – we're no longer the odd ones out, we're now essential members of the team.

Having the Digital Services team involved from the outset has many advantages, especially in comparison to involving the team only when needed (and often last minute). This allows the Digital Services team (as part of a wider Ashurst Advance offering) to fully scope client requirements and to deliver pragmatic advice as to how the matter is best delivered, which may or may not actually involve technology. An important part of my role is speaking up when technology isn't a good fit – it never ends well when technology is deployed for technology's sake.

Innovation is built on collaboration, and Ashurst really has this down to a fine art with our lawyers, technologists, project managers, process improvement and alternative resourcing experts and, perhaps most critically, our clients, working hand in hand to find new ways to deliver legal services. It's been great to see that Partners have shown a genuine interest in legal technology and I've had instances at client meetings where these Partners are explaining the benefits and virtues of our technology toolkit, which is always great to see and a testament to the openness, knowledge sharing and collaboration across the firm.

One of our biggest challenges is how we continue to spread the word internally, which is why we're actively broadening our enablement programme to take our digital services and toolkit globally to other offices with legal technology roadshows, lunch and learn sessions and hackathons.

As a Digital Services Manager, you have played in an integral role in delivering many innovative technology-led solutions for some of the firm's biggest clients. Can you talk us through one of the most powerful solutions you have delivered that has had a real impact?

Definitely. An example that springs to mind is a large project we carried out last year. As part of the Business Banking Switch Scheme, a global banking client required an end to end process to facilitate the processing and on-boarding of potential new customers. As the client was competing with other rival banks for these customers, it was critical that Ashurst provided a professional and efficient transfer process.

The Digital Services team, working with our existing technology stack including Contract Express and HighQ, collaborated closely with our in-house development team to develop an end-to-end solution to facilitate interpretation and extraction of structured data from the client in the form of an Instruction Letter. Our development team created a tool that enabled automatic machine reading and extraction of structured data from the Instruction Letter, which was then fed directly into our document automation software. Over 3,000 unique loan and security documents were generated for over 600 new customers for the client.

Our work on this project led to us winning the Most Innovative Law Firm 2019 at the British Legal Technology Awards.

How would you sum up the legal technologist role within Ashurst Advance in 3 words?

Innovative, strategic and integral.

Working in a technology-led environment must be very interesting! Can you tell us about an interesting fact about your role that our audience would find surprising?

Whilst I love technology, an element of my role is actually deterring people from deploying a tech solution. This might sound odd, but technology often isn’t the best solution! There is a tendency for people to see technology as a silver bullet, however, it isn't, and in fact it can be damaging to deploy a tech-driven solution when it isn't appropriate. I think that it's one of the most difficult messages for people to digest, especially when they've read about all the benefits of technology. With the vast capabilities of technology, it's important for us to remember to tailor these solutions to our client's requirements, not vice versa.

It can be tempting to advocate technology for all challenges (especially when clients have asked about it), however there is a need to be pragmatic and strategic on deployment. Here at Ashurst, we've been able to sit with clients and use our experience to explain the limitations and hurdles associated with using technology, which has been met with appreciation and recognition of our familiarity around legal technology tools – especially where other firms have been pushing a technology solution.

I think that’s why I enjoy the role so much – for every matter, there is a different solution! It never gets dull.