LegalTechTalk 2026: Privacy, AI and the New Legal Engineer - Ben Martin - E05

0:00Ben Martin:What happens when the brightest minds in legal, technology and innovation come together to shape the future of our profession? Welcome to the Legally Speaking Podcast Legal Tech Talk 2026 miniseries. As the UK's number one legal podcast and show ranked in the top 1 % of podcasts globally, we're delighted to be returning as the official media partner for Legal Tech Talk for the third time. Having supported this event since the beginning, we've witnessed firsthand how it has become Europe's largest legal technology conference, bringing together the people, ideas and innovations transforming the legal industry.

0:37Ben Martin:Across this special series, we'll be speaking with some of the world's leading legal professionals, founders, technologists, change makers to explore what's next for law. Because our mission remains the same, inspiring legal minds, transforming legal futures. Let's get into it.

0:58Hello everyone and welcome to the Legally Speaking podcast sponsored by Clio recording live here at Legal Tech Talk in London. Joining me now is another fantastic guest. Please kindly introduce yourself. Name, title and organisation. Hey, my name's Ben Martin. I am a legal engineer and the head of privacy at Wordsmith, which is a legal AI platform for in-house lawyers. Absolutely. And you're doing a fantastic job, it has to be said, and very present here at Legal Tech Talk 2026. The big theme about this year is transformation. In your view, what's the biggest single shift in the legal industry right now that people can no longer afford to ignore?

1:36So I think at a very high level, it's probably AI adoption. So using AI in some sense. we see so i work in ai so i see a lot of people starting to adopt it and where we see teams really getting excited and starting to gather pace and build on it you see the transformation happen massively probably then a sort of micro level i think agent adoption and building of workflows that are more complex than just taking your problem to a tool to fix it that for me feels like the next step on um and we had a really great session with people building lots of cool stuff today so yeah it's been really good yeah and i think it's a really valid point legal tech talk 2026 this year has really ramped up what's drew you to legal tech talk 2026 and what's been a highlight for you thus far yeah so it's actually my first time ever uh coming here um and i think well the reason i'm here is because wordsmith have uh one of the uh i think diamond sponsors so we we have a full uh sort of squad here today um but the thing that i think has been absolutely brilliant is just the conversations with so many different people um and just the scale of it and meeting people who i've not seen we bumped into henry um earlier and like people i've not seen in years and it's it's actually really nice to just see that whole legal community yeah absolutely and henry nelson case we're big fans of here on the show he's also been on the show go and check out his episode he's also at that corporate lawyer on socials okay the problem what is the problem or challenge you're fixated about trying to solve and why should people care about it in the legal industry so i'm my background is data protection i'm a privacy lawyer and i have been hounding and haranguing everyone within wordsmith talking about records of processing activity and the big data protection challenges so we hear a lot about uh contract law and redlining within the ai world but there's this whole piece for privacy lawyers for compliance for risk governance professionals and that feels to me a little little step behind and i really think that building these tools is going to be a massive leap forward for them because things like record processing activity subject access requests really time consuming really repetitive and there's so much that can be done to save time and i guess the kind of overarching theme of why i care about this and why i'm passionate about it is because it just makes people's jobs more fun like i had so many things in my last role which were very manual and quite frustrating uh and if you can just take that out such that you can actually interact with a business think about cool stuff that you can drive forward um yeah that's what i care about good for you okay let's talk about the human impact now we've talked a lot about technology automation innovation but if we get this right what's the real human impact how does it improve life for lawyers legal teams clients and overall society yeah so i think that point i mentioned for the last question around the sort of making people's jobs better for me is the first step then i would say you are starting to see people being able to focus on the work people say like strategic work and there's questions around what is strategic well i think people just focus on the work that they should be doing and that people have spent time training and developing and really building those skills so for me i think the quality of work people do will improve and yeah it will it will make everyone's jobs better in terms of the the sort of wider benefits to the business that people work in the organizations they will see an improved relationship with legal teams rather than being this stretched team that are always exhausted and kind of on the verge of burnout they will be able to get on the front foot and do stuff quickly serve their stakeholders really nicely and i guess from a wider societal perspective i think well i i think there's a lot of potential benefits for ai um more more broadly but probably in the legal context i don't know happier lawyers maybe and going about their day let's hope for that let's hope for that let's fast forward a few years now let's say it's 2030 um what will seem completely obvious in 2030 that most people in the legal world are still underestimating now yeah i would say probably don't need to wait to 2030 but like every year in ai i think is kind of four normal years pre-ai yeah stuff goes so quickly um so the the thing that i think is going to happen over the next 12 months and we've we've been talking a lot about this at wordsmith is that we are going to move from this point tool where you take the work and you do your work in a tool uh to ai legal ai specifically becoming almost like infrastructure in the same way you would say your email is infrastructure so i think this will take the format broadly of end-to-end workflow so you get your intake from email from slack from whatever it might be comes in you have built agents you've designed your workflows it does the work you then review it and then you approve take actions whatever needs to be done so you're doing that from within the ai tool rather than jumping around from lots of different tools very concise like it okay if you have the attention which I'm sure you do by now, of every law firm leader, general counsel, managing partner, legal operations professional, listening and watching this episode right now, what's one action they should take in the next 90 days to be better prepared for the future?

6:58I think for me, and I will always say this in any question like this, is start using voice. So dictating your prompts, dictating what you want to build agents when you're using AI, just use voice. The technology is really good now for it. And you speak faster, you can come up with more ideas you give more context so the output that comes out the other side is always much better um i would say there is a two to three month period of feeling like a complete weirdo um in the office doing it but um actually once you start doing it you notice that everyone around you is like oh that's cool and and gets involved agreed you know voice data conversational data as well acquiring that it's it's powerful stuff okay we're all about inspiring legal minds transforming legal futures on the league's bean podcast so final question what's one skill mindset or behavior you believe will separate tomorrow's leaders from everyone else yeah simple for me it's just curiosity um combined with creativity um i think with ai we are moving to a place where people no longer need to get external support in legal teams so if you're have ideas and you're able to think creatively about solving a problem that can be the start of finding a solution and linking that with an AI tool yeah so I think just you start to see especially a lot of in-house lawyers have gone on a bit of a wiggly career path they've not necessarily felt fitting fitting in certain environments in law firms so actually see we're specifically for in-house lawyers so I talked to a lot of in-house lawyers and you see them be very, yeah, very creative in their thinking.

8:39So I think they're very well placed to move forward. Love it. CC, I like that. Okay, on the curious of Oste side. If people want to know more about yourself, WorldSmithAI, where do they need to go? Feel free to share any websites, any social media handles. We'll also share this episode for you too. Cool. Thanks very much, Rob. Yeah, so I am on LinkedIn. I post quite a bit on there. I have also written a book, GDPR for Startups and Scale-Ups. And I actually have a podcast. It's not competing with yours. It's specifically for privacy and AI, and that's called subject access. Regarding Wordsmith, we are wordsmith.ai.

9:13And yeah, if people are interested, they can just reach out to me and we can chat on them. Perfect. Let's leave me to say thank you so much for joining me live here on the Legal Screen Podcast at Legal Tech Talk 2026. From all of us on the Legal Screen Podcast, sponsored by Clear, over and out. Thank you for listening to this week's episode. If you like the content here, why not check out our world-leading content and collaboration of the Legally Speaking Club over on Discord. Go to our website, www.legallyspeakingpodcast.com. There's a link to join our community there. Over and out.