What's next for NewLaw in 2023?

2022 has been a year of great uncertainty for most, but what will the future hold? Our Ashurst Advance leadership team give us their predictions on what lies ahead for NewLaw and the legal industry in 2023 and beyond.

Other trends will include proactive attempts by businesses to capture, store and leverage their data. This teamed with AI tools will allow businesses and their advisers to predict legal issues like a dispute or compliance breach before they occur and, in doing so, save the time and cost involved in dealing with the consequences.
Iain Brown, Head of Advanced Delivery Services


A shrinking labour market alongside increasing competition for talent means only leaders who invest in understanding changing employee expectations and delivering a distinctive employee experience will retain their top talent. Key to delivering on this will be increased experimentation with talent acquisition strategies and imbedding attractive career paths that challenge traditional linear approaches. Resilience and wellbeing of leaders and teams will continue to be challenged as many roles are enlarged to compensate for continued attrition of talent but roles that are enriched at the same time will provide opportunities to engage loyal advocates who can deliver clients an extraordinary experience.

Opportunities to increase market share through imbedding inclusive decision making processes and solving client challenges with multi-disciplinary teams with an output focus will be seized by the most progressive teams.
Dennis Sullivan, Senior People & Culture Business Partner

In the legal operations space, there will be a continued and heightened focus on legal spend cost savings and managing in-house legal headcount. GCs will be looking for advice on how to manage their departments more efficiently, how to structure their own legal operations internally and how to make the most out of their law firms and legal technology. The need for more automation of repetitive legal processes, technology such as 'legal front doors' to get the right work to the right resource and increased need for outsourcing the more commoditised legal tasks away from the in-house legal team.

The client demand for Legal Project Management will likely increase and we are already seeing clients demand a more sophisticated and mature LPM offering, with LPM needing to have professionally recognised project management qualifications and outside of 'legal' industry project management experience to bring professional rigour to the discipline. We will also likely see an increase in demand for LPM secondments to work in-house with our clients to manage large scale projects or their own legal operations challenges internally due to constraints on their own resourcing who may previously have played in this space.
Kate Bassett, Head of Legal Project Management and Process Improvement EMEA

During the course of 2022 we saw a marked increase in demand for legal managed services across multiple practice areas including banking, financial regulation, contract management and real estate. Clients are seeking alternate solutions to challenges presented by recurring or high volume tasks that are expensive to outsource under a traditional legal services delivery model and an unwelcome distraction for in-house lawyers who are looking to focus on more strategic work. We expect demand to continue to grow in 2023 as the core value propositions of legal managed services - efficiency, cost effectiveness and consistency of outcomes – deliver solutions to clients with cost and headcount pressures.

Nathan Bellgrove, Partner, Co-head of Ashurst Advance Delivery


Whilst not new in itself the shift towards SaaS platforms for eDiscovery will continue in 2023. The success of SaaS implementations will increase the profile of eDiscovery platforms and teams. As platforms are shown to be scalable and adaptable we will see a drive to increase the value that can be derived from these platforms. This will take the form of an increasing focus on end to end eDiscovery services and an increasing enthusiasm for using platforms to manage and add value when considering large data volumes outside of traditional eDiscovery use cases. This will offer great opportunities for SaaS adopters. However, the ability of law firms to take advantage of these opportunities will depend not just on having the right software but also on having the right processes and teams in place.
Mark Simmons, Head of eDiscovery EMEA


The last few years have seen dramatic growth in the use of flexible resourcing in the legal market as law firms and in-house teams have become more sophisticated and agile in how they resource their teams. During periods of great uncertainty, like those experienced during the pandemic, many organisations quickly put the brakes on permanent headcount and increasingly turn to flexible resources to meet the demands of work flows. Not only can flexible resources be turned off quickly if required, they also free up an organisation's balance sheet. Given major headwinds point to future economic challenges it is likely that 2023 will once again see organisations tightening headcount budgets and needing to think outside the box so that they can continue to meet the challenge of doing more with less.
Linda Grace, Head of Ashurst Advance Reach


As I reflected on my prediction for 2022 – in short, New Law becoming the norm and the established way of delivering legal services efficiently and effectively for clients - the legal industry has once again not moved forward as quickly as it should, with transformative change proving to be harder and taking longer than many of us had hoped.

A key contributing factor is that change programmes across the legal industry are very often losing focus and prioritisation when competing for time, resources and investment against much shorter term delivery pressures. Unfortunately the macro factors dominating 2023 are likely to result in those short term pressures intensifying. So, rather than make a prediction for 2023, I would like to issue a plea across the legal industry – make space within your key priorities for those change programmes, dedicate time and resource, and allow an appropriate focus on those activities which will deliver lasting change for good and remove many of those recurring and frustrating pain points which eat up so much time, cost and resource.
Mike Polson, Partner, Co-head of Ashurst Advance Delivery



Simplification. Why simplification? My team's work involves deeply understanding problems of staff at Ashurst and the clients we design services, products and solutions for. The common theme we've heard in all our work this year has been noise. So much noise. So many things to do. To be. To action. To keep on top of. To manage. To read. To learn. To respond to. To watch out for.

My aim as a designer of experiences, particularly digital experiences, in responding to the needs of those that will use them is to give the gift of a simpler, easier, less complicated and more sustainable work life (and maybe even non-work life as a result). So I predict simplification because that’s what we have been told is needed and therefore our role as designers is to make that real.

If only it was as simple to do as to write...
Sarah Chambers, Head of Digital Experience Strategy & Transformation


As predicted last year, our clients' appetite for digital transformation was strong in 2022, and this trend will continue year after year. As a result, there is an increasing demand for efficiencies and enhanced ways of working at the client level. Demand is being driven by newly formed industry-led initiatives that are driving the sector's digital agenda. Firms that support the delivery of these services will need to become part of that workflow and change their ways of working. As with the pandemic, market challenges are becoming catalysts for the rapid adoption of automation, and the current headwinds will be one of those catalysts.

Going forward, NewLaw will need to become more digital-first and flexible in providing clients with the services they need in their digital transformation journey – not a one-size-fits-all approach. For example, some clients are now comfortable with the cloud and connecting to their systems via APIs. NewLaw will be at the forefront in helping clients understand where law firms, in general, can play at the right level. We need to be honest about where we can offer full automation, create efficiencies, add real value, or support the client in implementing solutions themselves. We are already seeing NewLaw drive change within firms and across the whole of the legal sector to help make NewLaw BAU law. To be bold, is the prediction for 2023 that we will start discussing NewLaw being retired as a concept?
Matt Goff, Head of Digital Services

There will be a significant shift in the way data is collected, stored, and maintained in light of the various high-profile data breaches and forthcoming changes in the privacy laws in Australia. Organisations will need to consider the balance between the efficiency of large-scale document collections and the risk that certain types of data could leave the organisation.

We also expect to see significant growth in the use of AI technologies in 2023. AI models and their use cases are becoming more accessible as they continue to evolve and expand. Coupling the challenges around data breach response and data governance with a recession will put pressure on general counsels to deliver more with a smaller budget, accelerating the need to find new ways to drive efficiencies by relying on greater automation and the use of AI technologies.
Phil Smith, Head of eDiscovery APAC

If you would like to speak to the Ashurst Advance team about our NewLaw offering and how we can help our clients find innovative and cost-effective solutions to their legal challenges, please don't hesitate to get in touch.