Automating Justice: How Legal Engineering Transforms the Future of Law - Catherine Bamford - S9E18

0:00When lawyers think their area is bespoke, it's the nuances that are bespoke. Legal engineering is not just about the innovation and trying brand new stuff. A lot of the books I read and a lot of things I like are about marginal gains and continuous improvements. So a little bit here, a little bit there. It could be as simple as, do you have a single seller or multiple sellers? No one went to law school to put an S at the end of the word seller and change grammar from has to have. That's what automation can do for you. And you could then put in your nuanced bespoke details if you need. On today's Legally Speaking podcast, I'm delighted to be joined by Catherine Bamford.

0:35Catherine is the CEO and founder of Bam Legal. She has over 15 years of experience working with the world's leading law firms to help them implement document automation. As a legal engineer, Catherine has automated hundreds of documents whilst building due diligence platforms and contract review tools. She has been named the Financial Times top 10 legal technologist, European women in law tech winner, and is a woman of Legal Tech honorees. So a very big warm welcome to the show, Catherine. Thank you, Rob. I'm so happy to be here. Ah, well, we're so happy to finally have you. We're speaking off mic.

1:09I know it's taken a while for us to make this happen. But before we get into all your amazing work and things you've been getting up to over the past years, we do have a customary icebreaker question here on the Legal Speaking podcast, which is on the scale of one to 10, 10 being very real, what would you rate the hit TV series Suits in terms of its reality of the law if you've seen it? So I'm sorry, I'm one of those people that have never watched it. I don't really watch much television at all. My legal intro was more of Ally McBeal back in those days, which wasn't realistic at all. But yeah, zero for Suits, I'm afraid.

1:46And we'll move swiftly on. And so let's start with then, Catherine, a bit about your background and career journey. Tell all our listeners a bit about that. Yeah, sure. So I started off actually even before university. So I don't want to make this too long a story, but something that some people don't realise is I actually quit school at 17. So I didn't get A-levels, didn't finish school and was wanting to go and maybe do like, I don't know, some great picking in France or just go travelling or something like that. But my mom said, well, you can quit school. We know you're not happy there, but you probably should stay in education.

2:23So I went and did a GMVQ at a college in England. I left home. I was in Northern Ireland, left home, went and did that. And I did a business GMVQ and within that was a really tiny law module, like six weeks or something like that of like an hour a week. And I loved it. And, you know, they say it just takes that one teacher to inspire you. Well, the guy that ran that six week module really inspired me. And I thought, right, without A-levels, with just a GMBQ, is there any chance I could ever become a lawyer? Probably not. But I'll do everything I possibly can to try. So that was before this is how it's showing my age.

2:59But that was before, you know, kind of the days you could look everyone up on websites and email everyone. So I got the yellow pages and I wrote to every law firm in a kind of 30 mile radius saying, please give me some work experience. and Freeth Cartwright gave me some work experience and that was my first ever introduction to law and then I managed to find some universities that were taking people without A-levels and like kind of giving the equivalent by having the it was like an advanced GMEQ so I think it was the equivalent of like two and a half A-levels something like that so I got to Brunel and then what I thought was well if I'm going to be up against people at top universities and they get a 2-1 and I get a 2-1 from Brunel which is a good university but it's not you know seen for law as one of the top ones what would make a difference and I thought work experience would make a difference so I chose a longer degree that had work experience in the middle so it was a four-year degree but with a year's work experience at two firms so I did lots of really good like work experience within two different law firms and they offered me training contracts so I never had to go through that whole pain of trying to find one because the ones I did work experience gave me them.

4:10Eventually qualified Pinsent Masons and I was a real estate finance lawyer. Let's pick up from there then. Obviously, you're a lawyer at Pinsent's, then obviously moved to director of legal engineering at Deloitte Legal, I believe. But what prompted your transition from lawyer to legal engineer? When I was about, so when I first started, I was loving being a lawyer, really enjoyed the teamwork, the learning, the meeting the clients, the events it was all really good fun but maybe I chose the wrong area of law I don't know after a few years it was you were doing the same thing over and over again so I was doing like commercial real estate so I was doing leases licenses rent deposit deeds and it I just wasn't satisfied it wasn't fulfilling me I kind of and I was looking at the partners and thinking I don't want their life so if I do this for you know that was always the goal qualify and then make partner but then I was looking at the partners and thinking so basically I have to keep doing what I'm doing now for about 20 or 30 maybe longer years and then I might make partner if I'm lucky and I was looking at them and going their life doesn't look that much fun so also at that time the recession then hit and Pincense were brilliant in that a lot of law firms made redundancies because the recession really hit hard what they did was more like the KPMG model where they put everyone on a 20 % pay cut, but everyone went down to four days a week.

5:37So they tried to save lots of jobs, but went to that, except for a few of us that were put on internal secondments to try and make the law firm more efficient because clients were asking for more for less. So I was chosen to look at my team and how technology could help make it more efficient. And they had just bought in some document automation software. And I got my hands on that. It was meant to be a three-month secondment. And 15 years later, here I am. I just never went back. So that was my first experience with legal tech. And I just thought there's something to this. And back then, 15 odd years ago, you couldn't Google legal tech and find the vast amounts of information you could do previously.

6:16There wasn't even the job titles. We made up the job title legal engineer because we didn't know when I started hiring for the team because it actually went pretty well. They were like, oh, there's something to. this. We didn't know what to advertise for. So we called them legal knowledge engineers. So yeah, so that was how it was. It was the recession and I guess the combination of I was ready to stop fee earning anyway. So I approached the firm at the end of the secondment. I said, look, you know, I think there's something to this. Could I do this firm wide? I love that. And so let's move forwards then to July 2014, I believe, because you founded then BAM Legal, a trusted consultancy specialising in document automation.

6:59So can you tell us more about what BAM Legal is, please? Yeah, sure. So it's a legal technology consultancy for law firms, in-house teams, and also more and more these days, like alternative legal service providers. So we work for most of the large ALSPs. And we help those organisations to choose what technology to buy to solve their particular use cases, saving them having to go and see like demos of 200 different tools and then be chased by the sales teams of 200 different vendors. We take them through like the kind of the product procurement process of workshops, narrow down to top three, RFPs, pilots, implementations, change management, all that kind of thing.

7:46So either where they don't have resource themselves or their resource is extremely busy and they want just expertise pinpoint on particular niches. So it started off with DocAuto. Now it's a bit of everything. It could be like third-party contract review. This morning I was asked about using generative AI and deterministic tools to extract the information and then automatically draft the document. So without the human even in the middle filling out the questionnaire. So it's very varied as to what we do but um yeah it's it's legal technology advisors if you like yeah and it's it's fabulous and i've been following your journey for for many many years and you know we've got lots of mutual friends in and around the world of legal tech which now very much is a phrase or whatever you want to call it and i guess you touched on it before with the transition but i'm keen just to get the inspiration because i'm a big believer in like mission-led companies are the ones of the future but what inspired you to found BAM Legal?

8:48So there's the sensible logical answer which was I've been doing what I was doing for Pinset Masons for about four years and it was going quite well they won some awards and other law firms started tapping me on the shoulder and saying will you come and do what you've done there for us. So I was getting quite a lot of job offers and I thought there's enough job offers here to set up a consultancy. the story I don't share often and maybe because I've not made it a reality and that's maybe going to come in the next version of of BAM was I was actually in India over Christmas and thinking what would why would I do this what would be the mission what would be the purpose and I've always had a belief that a lot of what I do and I've learned and the connections I've made through doing what I do in the corporate sector could be applied to help with access to justice.

9:43So the goal was always learn, connect, grow as much as I possibly could. And so in between, I've done a lot of like access to justice events, some pro bono advisory. And I used to actually just volunteer at the RCJ for Support 3 Corp to just see what the problems were. Because yeah, I strongly believe that technology can do an awful lot to improve access to justice. So that was always the sort of, it was to improve the delivery of legal services for all was the kind of mission. And I think that's fantastic. And we fully support tech for good and particularly access to justice. Obviously, we partner with Clio on the show.

10:23They have a vision and mission to obviously transform the legal experience for all. And we're all for that. And I think everyone coming together, doing this great work, I think we absolutely can reduce that huge access to justice gap that exists. So, you know, thank you for the great work you're doing. You touched on it before, but I want to go a little bit deeper just to educate our listeners on this around the services ban legal offers, because it's legal service transformation, legal document automation, contract standardization. These are all hard words to say, aren't they? Strategic advisory events and workshops.

10:55So I guess for, again, folks that might be new to dipping their toe into purchasing or thinking about legal tech, just break a few of those down and go into a bit more detail. Yeah. So the kind of if it's a law firm that's kind of, as you say, dipping their toe in or just wondering where to start. Often we'll do like workshop days with the board or with they can bring in a group of lawyers or particular department to kind of brainstorm use cases, educate about different technology out there. what's the different technologies that work for different type of tasks you know whether we're talking drafting negotiating workflow anything it may be um so that's the kind of workshop side of things um the and then the full other side of it is you know at the moment we have like a a large global law firm that we're talking to who have a huge innovation team have lots and lots and lots of legal technology products, but have reached a bit of a plateau.

11:59And they'd like us to come in and just review the whole thing and maybe assess where things could be changed because they feel, and this is the case with a lot of large organisations at the moment, who have invested in legal tech over the years and resource, is that they've almost become technology-led. So rather than, so what's happening now is they've bought a load of technology and there's people going around the law firm going, can you use this? Can you use this? Rather than it being problem use case first and then the technology to solve it type thing. So it's almost like have the technology and then are scrambling to get the use cases.

12:39Yeah, thank you for giving such clear examples for that. And I guess coming to you for some perhaps careers advice now, you've made the transition from lawyer to legal tech entrepreneur. I'm sure there'll be people listening to this that might be thinking to how you were way back then. But let's be real. What was the biggest challenge in making that transition from lawyer to legal tech entrepreneur? And I appreciate it was a while back now. So what would you say perhaps for people looking forwards in sort of 2025? Because I think I appreciate it's different times. So the biggest challenge for me then was how I was going to pay my rent the next month.

13:10Yeah. Because I was going to lose my salary and I wasn't going to be able to invoice until 30 days post. So I was extremely lucky that there was a senior associate in the law firm I was leaving that I mentioned this to when they said, oh, well done for you for going to set up your own business and good for you. And she wasn't a close friend or anything like that. But she she just said to me, well, I'll lend you 500 pounds. And that was it. And, you know, I was like, well, as soon as I get paid my first invoice, I'll pay you back. And yeah, so I've always believed in kind of like paying that forward.

13:45I'll never forget that gesture of someone believing in you and trusting in you to just help you make that step. Making the transformation the biggest thing to do is kind of make sure you have a plan for those that that roadway, if you like. Is it called roadway? Runway, that's it. So you have like your first couple of clients or your set amount of money that you know will keep you going till you get things rolling. because that's the scariest time is that beginning stage network like anything from before you even thought you have a business idea um all the kind you know i was speaking to some law students on friday at anglia ruskin university and um saying to them on linkedin now connect with all of each other because in 10 years time that's your network already you're all going to be working in lots of different law firms and legal businesses um so yeah so my advice to people now would be network network network build it up um so that when you do launch your business you've got lots of people that would be happily supporting you get the word out there oh you're talking my language there lots of things that i you know people have been listening to show since day dot or watch me talk i always talk about nsn never stop networking and work warm and you gave a great example of networking warm there with your existing cohorts because they'll never to be go off and build their network so it's not just that individual it's a network of a network you'll then acquire and yeah all of that great stuff so really good advice all right let's go more into automation now you know something you know a thing or two about but was there a pivotal moment in your career or just sort of looking up where you felt that the legal industry really does need better automation i think from that day one for me it was so obvious yeah because i was doing real estate for like large investors and pension funds and that kind of thing.

15:40So they would own shopping centres, office blocks, you know, kind of where they would have multiple tenants within and the law firm would manage that asset for them. So every time we did a lease for that shopping centre, there was a lot of the same information that would go in and the tenant nearly always would pay a rent deposit so the lawyers would have to draft one of those as well then there's also these other documents like notices and stat decks so every time you did a deal you had to do about six documents um draft six documents at once and you were putting the same information manually into those in like even just we think the party names yeah so for me as soon as I saw automation and understood how it worked where you put the information in once and it prepares the first draft of all of the documents ready for you it would just be you know it was kind of I use the example of like no one questions accountants using excel a lot of what lawyers do is drafting so why are people even questioning using very simple tools like this to do it for them um so for me that was that was kind of obvious with the automation and then probably the biggest like the bit where I started to be almost like recognized as oh she's she's quite good at this or you know she knows what she's doing is when we started to use it for things that it hadn't been used for before um so with with Pinslet Mason's famously and I can talk about this because they've talked about it publicly was it was called Project Rock and it was where over Christmas um there was thousands and thousand property reports to be doing for a real estate finance deal.

17:24So it was after the recession, it was when all the Irish banks were selling off their debts to some funds. And Pincents won millions and millions of pounds worth of work from some magic circle firms because they automated the process of doing it. And that was something that through the night I kind of built with a couple of banking and real estate finance partners. And yeah, that just kind of like took off and in the firm got the recognition because I think it was like one of the biggest deals, you know, that had been done that year and that kind of thing. And then everyone started going, how could we use it?

17:58And that was when suddenly law firms started realizing when we go to pitches, when we answer RFPs, we want to be saying how we deliver it using technology to be faster, smarter, not even necessarily cheaper, but just if you can do it in a week and someone else saying it's going to take them four weeks, you know, that's of interest. So that was one of the big ones. I kind of guess I got some recognition for it, if you like, as to what I could do. And that's huge, right? And I think, you know, just thinking back to generally any business, you know, I think whenever you've got a product or service, it's meeting clients where they're at and understanding the benefit to them.

18:36And like you say, it doesn't, you know, whenever you're thinking about selling, it's time, quality or cost. So it's not all those three variables. So, you know, like you said, it's not necessarily being the cheapest, actually the quality and the time and the delivery there, you can sell the benefit to them. I love that. Okay, let's talk about a bit of pessimism. Let's talk about a bit of misconceptions when it comes to automation. What are the biggest ones you hear from lawyers around document automation when it comes to just a wrong misconception?

19:04So there's still to this day certain lawyers and certain law firms that question why they would want to do things faster when they charge by the hour, which surprises me but it still happens um so that's the the biggest one that unfortunately there's still firms that think in that way um mainly more in the states now than in europe because they still do in some some places in the states still do get to charge us on the clock um but then when it comes to automation itself i think the the most common one is my area of work is too bespoke and you can't automate what I do. So of course you could do real estate or employment contracts or NDAs but what I draft every day is so complicated you couldn't automate that.

19:52I've never in my 15 years come across a document that couldn't, the drafting of which could not be sped up in some way or improved in some way because it's not always about the speed as you just said, Rob, it can sometimes be improving the quality of the product, consistency, reducing risk. So I've never found an area yet, you know, it could be that you work in, I think I said the other day, an example of you could work in space law, but you're still going to have parties, you're going to have the logistics of the rocket, you're going to have, you know, whatever it might be, you're selling moon rocks, there's still going to be a price, there's going to be, you know, what happens if there's a dispute and you're not happy with it?

20:34You're going to have insurance, you're going to have really complicated jurisdiction clauses, you know, but you could automate all of those and go, is the jurisdiction Mars or Pluto? You know, whatever it may be, and it'll pull in the right clauses and the right definitions. Sorry, a bit of an extreme example there, but just when lawyers think their area is bespoke, it's the nuances that are bespoke, the heavy lifting of the drafting and it could be as simple as do you have a single seller and multiple sellers no one went to law school to put an s at the end of the word seller and change grammar from has to have that's what automation can do for you and you could then put in your nuanced bespoke details if you need today's episode is brought to you by clio leaders in legal tech and the team behind one of the most exciting ai launches this summer clio duo is arriving this summer and it's already creating a stir.

21:24Built right into Clio Manage, Duo uses AI to help you draft emails, capture time, summarize documents automatically. It's smart, seamless, and designed to save you hours every week. Find out more and see what Clio Duo can do for your firm at clio.com forward slash UK. Now back to the show. Just to sort of build on the point around, you know, you know, we're not going to debate the billable hour, but I definitely see a future of sort of value-based pricing and tiered pricing and that future and Sean Jardine who's been on the show who ran you know a very successful law firm many many moons ago talks a lot about this and gives a very simple example of if you have toothache would you be happy to pay less and wait to get relief of that or would you be happy to pay more to get the same quality of service but faster and I think if you can kind of educate your clients and put it into that mindset then it's not necessarily a race to the bottom when it comes to the advent of including a lot of legal technology Yeah, not at all.

22:18And going back to that example that I said about working with like investors and pension funds, each day that goes by, so say it's real estate, if they have an empty unit that doesn't have a tenant in paying rent, each day that goes on before they've completed that lease is devaluing the value of their portfolio because they don't have the income of those assets coming in. so the faster you do it the actual more money you're making your client um so that's you know or it could be onboarding an employee it could be getting that you know for in-house teams getting that contract in place to allow you to do that service um yeah the the amount of i think it was the um the iacc or the world contracting commerce you know i'm terrible with acronyms but it was one of them that looked at something like nine billion it's like you know the gap of that the delay time if you like, in getting contracts signed.

23:11Yeah, again, another really good example. And thanks for sharing that. Because I think framing things where people can really get on board with it will hopefully help education, but also adoption as well. Because, you know, we are in this stage of 2025 where, you know, it's no longer a nice to have. And I know we were talking off air about that as well. We have mentioned the word AI. Yeah. And we're well into a podcast. So I guess we're going to have to. So how do you, and, you know, obviously we can timestamp this because things are literally changing by the minute, the hour and the day. But how do you see genuinely AI and automation reshaping the role of lawyers in the coming years?

23:47Yeah, I think a lot. I do, actually. It's such an exciting time. And I've been on the kind of change journey where I was initially sceptical. Then I was a little bit fearful and everything else. But now I'm definitely on the excited time and the experimenting time. whereas document automation is one example is a way to use technology to do one task so draft the document with the lawyer filling in the client details and matter information what I'm starting to to help organizations with now and particularly I'm actually working a lot with the vendors now they're getting me in to experiment with deterministic logic and AI is where can we combine the two?

24:31So the other day I was working with two vendors who are looking at partnering on using generative AI to extract information from the client's instructions, whether that be an email, a heads of terms, both, put them both in. Could be the transcription of a Teams meeting where you interviewed the client, whatever it may be, you take those, extract information and then use deterministic logic to draft the document. Then we're working with clients on third-party contract review, so using playbooks to negotiate. So a lot of the tasks that previously were taking lawyers hours of time can now be done in minutes or even some things are being done automatically.

25:15We've worked with one organization recently where from a team's meeting that happens every month, they're automatically getting minutes produced, board minutes at the end of it. So no one's having to go on and do that as a task after using things like transcription and automation. So I think the hours of what lawyers do, if we break it into tasks of what lawyers do, is being sped up immensely. And the lawyer's role of the future will be a lot more about service delivery and project management, winning work, business development, as opposed to the heavy lifting of manual drafting of a document.

26:07I agree. I'm going to push you a bit further. AI replacing lawyers. There's been a lot of commotion regarding that and will continue to be, I'm sure. But what are your thoughts about the statement that AI will replace lawyers? Will it happen? Is it currently happening? Yeah, tell us. I think it will replace the current ways that lawyers deliver tasks.

26:30I don't think it will reduce the number of lawyers like some people predict, but I just think that the, because the more it seems to be, the more technology and the more advances the more legal things there is to think about you know so i'm not sure it'll reduce the number of lawyers necessarily but i do think that there will be the role of a lawyer will be very different and they'll probably be different job titles just like 10 years ago we saw job titles like legal technologist legal engineer i think if we were to look at a service industry now a technology business that delivered a service it's more what are the job functions within that service business and then which bits the lawyers do I think it will look very very different but I don't think the numbers will be reduced.

27:18Yeah and I think that's such a great way of looking at it and you know Goldman Sachs I think released a report saying you know 60 % of jobs didn't exist 80 years ago so you just think of a simple example social media wasn't around 80 years ago social media managers that's just a simple example to use but you know roles inevitably are going to be reshaped and reformed if we're not getting more efficient if we're not getting faster if we're not kind of innovating, then there might be a slight concern. Okay, let's go back to content now, actually, regarding automation, because you put a lot of good content out there.

27:48You've also, you know, produced some good articles. And in one of your articles, you state which legal documents to automate. So the answer depends on a number of things, such as the main practice areas of the firm, areas operating on fixed feeds, or needs to improve margin slash profitability, the experience level of their automator and the senior level of support. So can you share with us why these factors specifically are important to consider when it comes to document automation from your experience? So yeah, so starting where you have fixed fee work just makes the implementation, the change management a lot easier within a law firm.

28:30And then you can show, you can use like actual data points of how much you've improved profitability to show the rest of the law firm why they should consider using this. I think, what were some of the other things? Give me some of those. It needs to improve their profitability or margins. Yeah. The reason I talk about that one as opposed to is because strategy wise, when we say to people, you know, what is it you want to do with legal technology? We also always start with, you know, the famous Simon Sinek always start with why. And it's the reason we do that is because sometimes it's they want to grow a new area and win more clients.

29:15So actually, they want to have a really amazing way of delivering that service so they can go and win more clients. But for some areas, it's like we need to improve profitability because we know what's market. We quote market. We're writing off a lot of time. And actually, even though it's a really, really busy department, profitability is terrible. So we used to always reward lawyers by how much they brought into the business. So that corporate team, well, they made millions last year. But if profitability is tiny, then, you know, sorry, it doesn't matter if you did a multi-million pound deal last year it still didn't actually make any money for the firm you know compared to employment over there that are doing thousands of smaller deals um but are really really profitable because they've streamlined everything so that's why i say to focus on on that um it's yeah it's more your your drivers i think um having a senior sponsor within the department is game changing you know so having someone that encourages it the use of automation and legal technology in the team rather than it being the juniors or the knowledge lawyers doing something and then almost having to convince them just means that you know if they stand up and they go I've seen this I've tried this I've used it this is something we're all going to get behind and if anyone can help um you'll be you know if they name check juniors that have helped then other juniors want to get involved and roll in so senior sponsor like with any change um management game changing and and the worst projects i've worked on people always like to know the horror stories rather than success stories the worst projects i've worked on is where we've had terrible senior sponsors who haven't really believed in it they've just been put on it by the law firm they've gone oh you go and manage that and actually they've just got in the way questioned everything not really believed in it and just yeah it's been it's been painful yeah entrepreneurship i have battle scars from those kind of ones i'm sure and i mean we brushed over this so i want to go into a little bit more detail because um you were one of the very first legal engineers but again we're in an evolving world um would you mind explaining very simply what a legal engineer is and what does legal engineering involve?

31:35Yeah, sure. So it was a way to try and explain what we were trying to do and that was looking at the process, the as-is process, if you like, of what the lawyers were doing when they were delivering the service and by using people, process and technology, re-engineering it to make it more streamlined. And legal engineering is not just about the innovation and trying brand new stuff. A lot of the books I read and a lot of things I like are about, you know, marginal gains and continuous improvement. So, you know, a little bit here, a little bit there. So that was what we it started off because it was Richard Susskind in one of his books said something like in the future, there will be this thing that will be a job title called Legal Knowledge Engineers.

32:23engineers so it was orlando conetta that i worked with at pincense suggested that we use that when we were hiring our first legal knowledge engineer so pavin sharma and sarancore who are now you know legal engineer superstars at chanel and hsbc um and then when i set up bam legal i dropped the knowledge bit because it wasn't just about the content it was very much about the resource and the technology and the process as well. So that's why I dropped it and put that in. And then when we set up, well, not we set up, when Wavelength was founded and I became a non-exec and an investor in that, that was the first ever legal engineering firm, if you liked.