This week the Legal Geek team has been speaking to Rhys Hodkinson from the team at Definely. Rhys is speaking at this year’s Legal Geek Conference in October.

Hello! Thanks for chatting with us, Rhys. First up, it would be great if you could give us a quick intro to yourself and your background?

Hey Legal Geek! Great to chat as always. Sure, I’m a former corporate solicitor, I started my career working at Baker & McKenzie in South Africa, before studying in the UK for a year. Knowing how much I would have benefited from Definely when I was practising law, it was an easy decision to join the team on their mission to make drafting simple. At Definely, I head up all things commercial and have found it incredibly fulfilling to be able to help emancipate fellow lawyers from the boring (read: unbillable), repetitive tasks we’ve become so accustomed to.

In less than a tweet – what does Definely do?

That’s a challenge because Definely does so much, ok, so…

Ever find yourself on page 157 of a 400 page agreement searching the entire document to understand each defined term and reference? Not any more! Definely enables you to access and edit this information with one click without losing your position or context.

You are going to be talking about how law firms should track the impact of technology by looking at productivity growth. I know you have some great case studies from other sectors, can you tell us a little bit more about this?

One of the principles we live by at Definely is “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. A digital transformation strategy, or any strategy for that matter, is no different. Before beginning the process of using LegalTech to transform your law firm or in-house team, it’s important to ask both “what are we trying to achieve?” as well as “how do we know we’re achieving it?”.

In terms of measuring how technology is disrupting or making sectors more efficient, the most widely accepted metric is called productivity growth. We will look at how we can define productivity growth within the legal sector, dig into the data by looking at the top 50 UK law firms over the past decade to see how they have been performing against that metric and look at how lawyers, based on this analysis, are quite similar to miners!

What do you think are the key lessons law firms need to take from this?

Whilst it is true that the legal sector has its idiosyncrasies and is unique from other sectors in terms of structure and business model, there are still a lot of lessons and success stories that can be taken from other sectors that have already gone through the transformation that’s currently taking place in the legal sector.

After Definely’s talk, attendees will (hopefully) walk away with a better understanding of how to apply learnings from parallel sectors and develop a successful transformation strategy using efficiency metrics.

Want to hear the talk if full – get your ticket to the Legal Geek Conference in October.