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For this award-nominated senior lawyer, successful implementation of new technologies is about far more than simply being better placed to offer a more human service; it’s also about ensuring he can be more present, personally and professionally.
Legal experts are continuing to advocate for the integration of technology to automate repetitive tasks, allowing lawyers to deliver a more efficient, human-centred legal practice.
On a recent podcast of The Lawyers Weekly Show, Jerome Doraisamy was joined by Daniel Rod, special counsel at Chamberlains, to talk about how lawyers are being challenged to rethink how they practise, in a legal profession that is increasingly driven by technology.
A finalist in the Innovator of the Year category at the Australian Law Awards, Rod is a family law specialist with over 15 years’ experience. For him, technology is more than just replacing the human aspect of legal practice; instead, it is about creating systems that remove tasks that are tedious and repetitive, and organising information to create more time to build meaningful client relationships.
As AI usage becomes inevitable in everyday endeavours, lawyers are increasingly being encouraged to reconsider how they conduct legal matters.
Rod’s approach centres around two prominent themes, human-centred legal practice and technology-driven efficiency, with both intertwining with the aim to form a more efficient approach to legal practice in the modern age.
A human-centred legal approach
Throughout the conversation, Rod highlighted how technology can support lawyers without removing the human side of client relationships.
Emphasising that the fundamental principle of family law is about supporting people through difficult and vulnerable situations, Rod explained that the human interaction element must remain at the forefront, with technology operating quietly in the background.
“At its forefront, family law is about people; it’s about vulnerable people, it’s about children and people who really don’t have the skills to argue themselves,” Rod said.
“For me, technology is something that sits invisibly along the side and allows me to do the job.
“For example, when I’m meeting a client for the first time, we have our intakes and technology assists with the intake form.”
With this approach, lawyers are able to focus their attention on what clients really need when they are reaching out for legal guidance.
“The client’s coming to me for advice, saying, Daniel, I genuinely don’t know what to do – help me.”
“There's the psychological aspect of them, and then to interface with the people around them and their relationships.
“It's about helping them as a person grow, but also sort of solving their problem holistically.
“Technologies assisted enormously in my practice because for somebody that didn't have sort of a basic understanding of AI software or things that it can do.”
Ultimately, Rod noted that he believes technology can create more space for lawyers to remain present, both at a professional and personal level.
“It's the ability to remain human, to finish up my day knowing that my work is there, it's done, and I can pick it up later if I need to another time, be present with my family.”
Technology-driven efficiency
Rod demonstrated how technology can minimise the sometimes tedious and mundane tasks that come with being a lawyer, ultimately allowing people to focus their time on more sophisticated legal tasks.
His approach commenced with identifying the inefficiencies that existed in traditional legal workflows.
“There were so many inefficiencies in the way we did things and the way we thought and the way we produced our documents that my clients deserved better than just repetition and precedence and the same old jargon,” Rod said.
“In a couple of seconds you can do something which would have traditionally taken many hours, but you've arrived at the appreciable benefit for the client.
“We are no longer just automatons and doing mechanical things; the genuine advances in technology these days mean that we can sort of automate the grunt work for us.”
Rod suggested that lawyers can improve their workflows by starting with simple tasks that consume unnecessary time, alluding to a practical example of his own.
“Every workflow that they do has something they see that can be done more efficiently, and you start slowly by saying, I’ve got a bunch of files that need to be renamed.”
He explained that technology has allowed him to make large, sophisticated bodies of information much easier to process.
“The AI model basically took all 2,678 pages and turned it into a text replica. So it took the size of a 1 gigabyte file and made it 3 megabytes.
“That saves the client money, so it’s thinking outside the box. You have a problem in front of you that technology can solve.
“It’s, how do we quickly resolve it to get to the legal point we want to make?”
