 Good evening everyone, we're just about to start. Thank you all for joining us this afternoon. My name is Arjun and I'm Speaker Secretary at the Cambridge University Law Society. Before we begin, we'd like to thank the sponsor of our speakers program, Clifford Chance. They offer opportunities to students from first year onwards and you can find out more by visiting their careers website. Today we are very pleased to welcome Christina Black-Laws to address us on the future of legal services. Following her address, Christina will take questions from the audience. The video recording of the Q&A will be edited out and the Chatham House rule applies, so please ask your questions freely. Christina is the President of the Law Society of England and Wales and one of our areas, one of our areas of focus has been the future of legal services. She studied jurisprudence at Oxford University and qualified as a Solicitor in 1991. She has developed and managed law firms including a virtual law firm and setting up the first ABS with the co-op. Today, Christina holds a range of public appointments including member of the Family Justice Council, Trustee of Law Works, member of the Judicial Diversity Forum and Chair of the Government's Law Tech Delivery Panel. She's heavily involved in the technological issues relating to supranational legislative and regulatory frameworks, as well as the need to demystify law tech and empower all lawyers to embrace relevant technology. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming Christina Blacklaus. Thank you very much, Arjun, and after an introduction like that, all I can be is a disappointment to you, so apologies if that turns out to be the case. I'm really pleased to be here and hope that you will listen to me without prejudice because I am from the other place. I hope that this session can be as interactive as possible as well, so do please interrupt me if you have any questions that you want to ask or I'd be very interested in any comments that you have to make about what I'm... What I'm about to tell you... So, where do we start? The legal profession is set to go through a period of really profound change in the years ahead as a transforming society and rapidly technological developments make their mark in the way that we work and the way that we interact with one another. And as you're going to make up the next generation of lawyers, it's perhaps even most important that you are aware of these changes and how legal services will need to adapt to the future. So, I've been asked to speak to you about the future of legal services and I think I'll adapt that slightly if I might and cover it in three different ways. So, I want to talk about diversity and that will be, I think, a key feature of our future. I want to talk about how legal services will be fundamentally grounded in technology. And finally, and probably briefly because I'll run out of time, about how legal services will be increasingly internationalist. But before I start, perhaps if you indulge me a little, I don't know how much you know about the law society and the role that it plays in the profession. So, the law society is the member body of the solicitors profession. There are nearly 200,000 solicitors in England and Wales and the job of the law society is to be the voice of the profession, to drive excellence in the profession and to safeguard the rule of law. And we do that in a number of different ways. So, we engage with government in all its formations to influence them and impact them by speaking out on behalf of justice and on legal issues. We promote the profession, both domestically and internationally, and drive professional excellence by helping solicitors to develop their expertise and their businesses wherever they may work. And this includes ensuring that the very best, the brightest and the best, can join our profession irrespective of their background. So, we are always supporting equality, diversity and inclusion in the solicitors profession. And we also fulfil, and this is often forgotten, a very important statutory public interest function. And that aims to ensure that we have access to justice in our country and beyond, that we protect human rights and freedoms and that we uphold the rule of law. I also wanted to mention that we do have a dedicated junior lawyers division. The division has around 70,000 members and they are aspirant or junior solicitors, much as yourselves. And the junior lawyers division can really support you taking through your journey of qualification, traineeship and admittance as a solicitor. I would encourage you to have a look at their website and follow them on Twitter. So, let me turn to my first theme around diversity and inclusion. It's, in fact, it's one of the main themes of my presidential time. And we know that it is right and just and moral for us to have diverse and inclusive workplaces. But it also is a business imperative. There is a hard-nosed business case for diversity and inclusion. It helps us to attract and to retain the best talent and enables us to understand our clients and meet their needs more effectively. We must, of course, always represent the diversity of the communities that we serve. And just to briefly run through some of the latest stats. So, since this year, women have represented 51% of the solicitors population. And yet we only account for 28% of partners and I'll come back to this in a bit. 2% of solicitors have confirmed that their gender identity, their current gender identity is different to that given to them at birth. And although we don't have, I think, sufficient statistical data about transgender people in the UK, I think it's really to be welcomed that the SRA is now recording this data. So we'll see how that develops. This is a new development this year. There has been an increase in the proportion of Black minority and ethnic lawyers, the AME lawyers working in law firms. And the AME lawyers now make up about 20% of practicing solicitors. So that's slightly higher than the national average of about 15%. And interestingly, BAME students account for about 40% of students undertaking law degrees. So I think we anticipate that we'll see a greater percentage of BAME solicitors in the not too distant future. However, BAME solicitors only represent 11% of partners in law firms. And there is a significant variation of practice areas here too. So firms undertaking mainly criminal work or private client work have a significantly higher proportion of solicitors from BAME backgrounds. On disability, I think we are under recording. So in the latest SRA stats, only 3% of solicitors said that they were disabled, which is compared to about 10% of the working age population. So we need to find out why there is under recording here. I'll talk a little bit more about social mobility and social inclusion later. But as a law society, we definitely see it as our role to encourage diversity in all areas of our profession. We need to help to overcome the barriers by working with firms and working with individuals to ensure that, as I said before, the brightest in the breast can enter our profession and that there is true and genuine equality of opportunity through the legal profession. As I said to you, women make up over 50% of practicing solicitors now. But you might be surprised to know that actually since 1990, women have represented nearly two thirds of new entrants into the solicitors profession each year. So it's been between about 60 and 67% every single year since 1990. So despite having a significantly female talent pipeline, as I said before, we've only got, if we look at private practice, where most solicitors still practice, only about 28% of partners in private practice are women. And that delies to additional and significant features. One is that most of those women are in their own practices, so in small businesses. And secondly, if we look at our largest law firms, you will struggle to find 15% female ownership. So that partner stat includes salaried partners. So it is not uncommon for women to be at 12, 13, 14% of ownership in large law firms. And that says to me that we have a systemic issue here. And that's why in my office holder time, I've been focusing very specifically on women in leadership in law. And what we wanted to do is to try and find out why this is happening. So 30 years of two thirds female, still a quarter of that in terms of ownership. So we conducted a survey. It ended up being the largest ever global survey around this issue. And we had around 8,000 people respond to it. We were supported in it by LexisNexis and the International Bar Association. So it's syndicated to 125 different countries. And so it gave us some really solid data. And we concluded this survey in February of this year. And some of the results were really interesting. I just want to point out a couple of them to you. There was a great deal of agreement that there had been some progress on gender equality over the last five-year period. But that was really skewed by gender. So 74% of the men who answered said, yes, there's been solid, in fact, stellar progress here. Only 48% of the women who responded said that they also thought there had been progress. We asked people what was the key barrier to women progressing in their career? And the vast majority of people responded that that was unconscious bias, which I think is an interesting and challenging issue. When we ran a similar, much smaller survey five years before, the issue was identified as the lack of flexible or agile working. So maybe we've moved on in terms of some of the processes in place and some of the opportunities to be more agile and working. However, unconscious bias is a really difficult one to tackle because it's what goes on in here and in here. And you cannot policy your way out of unconscious bias. It is about the culture of the individuals and the culture of the business. So a real challenge. Another thing, just to highlight one of the other findings was around the fact that many of the business development opportunities and opportunities for promotion were very male orientated. So as and when you get into your law firms, be challenging perhaps about business development opportunities, the opportunities to get close to clients because you'll find still that there is a predominantly around sports and drinking culture, which is not just exclusive for women on occasions, but is also exclusive excluding of other groups. We asked about gender pay and 60% of people said that they were aware of a gender pay gap in their organization and yet only 16% reported that their organization was doing anything to address it. And not to put you off the law, but the gender pay gap is a huge issue in our profession with some firms who have been brave enough to report their partner remuneration as well as their staff remuneration, having gender pay gaps or sit between 65 and 70%. So armed with this research, we then decided that we needed some qualitative data as well. So over the summer, we have conducted nearly 200 round tables and the round tables, having women's round tables, the purpose of which has been twofold. One is to get that and the Chatham House rules applied to round tables. The first was to get that understanding of what women's experiences were like in 2018. And I can tell you that some of the information that we heard is not only not best practice, but quite frankly illegal, but also to empower women to become leaders and change makers in their own organizations. And to that end, we created a toolkit which was centered around unconscious spias, gender pay gap, women's history. It is next year, our centenary of being able to become lawyers. Prior to that, women were not considered to be persons within the Civicitors Act and therefore under disability and therefore not able to practice law. So we want to celebrate our centenary and commemorate those first women. So we'll be producing a book next year and one of the activities in the toolkit is to surface that information because like almost all women's history that isn't collated and documented and it just disappears. And there is a big program around male champions for change because if you go back to my original stat about at least 85% of current owners and decision makers in large law firms being men, then we are not going to get anywhere unless we can actively engage with those men. And I'd say to you that what is a gender issue becomes a generational issue, particularly with your generation and millennial generation. So it is something that law firms really need to tackle if they want to keep and retain any of their stuff. So we are also going to run men's round tables over the winter, we're starting those. And once we pulled all of this data together and we're doing a piece of academic, an academic literature review which covers the, which is global again, we'll pull all of the insights together and we'll be holding an international symposium in London, predict near diary 20th and 21st of June next year and all of the data will be available for international women's day. This is one of the projects which is about building the profession for tomorrow. And that let me also perhaps in that to talk about something that is around roots to qualification because this is perhaps even more pertinent to you. To qualify as a solicitor used to be only really one route which was to do a qualified degree or to then convert your degree into a qualifying degree like doing the GDL and then doing a further vocation a year and then two years on the job training as a training contract. Now there are other opportunities. So when the solicitors qualifying exam comes in and that will impact upon the wall or if you intend to become solicitors, so that's the end of 2020, that will change the way that we assess whether somebody is of suitable quality to get the title of solicitor. So I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have to the best that I can because the devil will be in the detail. We don't know much of the detail yet about that in the Q and A. But even before the SQE comes into effect we do have other routes of qualifying as a solicitor beyond the LPC and training contract. So I want to just erase your awareness about equivalent means training and that this means that you can have other experiences outside of training contract which can go towards your qualifying period. There's also the qualified lawyers transfer scheme for anybody who has a professional qualification from another jurisdiction. We've had nearly a thousand lawyers qualify in that way and apprenticeships. Apprenticeships we greatly encourage because they are really important to improve social mobility in our profession. If I tell you that 80% training contracts for large law firms go to Russell Group people then it's completely and that is compared to 50% in the civil service. So it is a real issue in our profession. But let me move on if I might to technology because I think that the legal practice of the future will be deeply rooted in new technology and by that I mean technologies that are based on algorithmic determination, machine learning. And this is becoming embedded already in our sector. So by the time you get into practice this will have gone in terms of service delivery from something things that have been piloted at the moment to things that are absolutely fundamentally mainstreamed in practice. And the development of these new technologies having a really transformative impact on all aspects of modern society in our legal sector is no different to that. The external environment continues to shape the way we work as solicitors and we are trying to address that and I'm going to talk thematically really about the legal challenges that are presented by emerging technologies. How these technologies enable the practice of law and improvements in process and the role of technology in the justice system. So first of all, the challenges. So emerging technologies really challenge the existing legal frameworks and are requiring us to, and this is a present tense, rethink how legal services are delivered. But they also pose larger ethical and moral questions about how we want to shape our future. So examples of that use of genomics or drones or facial recognition. And algorithms are dictating all of our lives already. I think quite often enough I'm speaking to an audience of lawyers and I ask them are you using algorithms? Maybe 10%, 20% will put their hands up. But actually, as we know, we are all using and being subject to algorithmic determination every single day of our lives. And we can see some really concerning examples here. So if we look last year at the crash of the pound, that crash by 6%, which was because of currency trends which are triggered by algorithmic trading. Of course, the speed of this trading means that it can trigger flash crashes and being righted before any human beings even realised anything has happened. One of the chief concerns that we have as lawyers and I think it's beholden, honest as lawyers to address or at least to attempt to address these issues is around the issue of transparency. So transparency is a basic principle of justice. The requirement to explain and to justify the reasons for a decision. And this applies across almost all fields of decision making, both in public sphere and within organisations. But as AI algorithms grow more advanced, it becomes much more difficult to make any sense of their inner workings. So there's a danger that AI decisions are taken as slightly more scientific and objective in a way that we recognise that perhaps human decisions are not. Yet, do we really know which bits of data or machine code have led to a particular AI outcome? I'd suggest that we don't, the vast majority of algorithmic determination. AI does allow us to become much more efficient in the use of our time by giving us the information that we want to need because we've wanted to need it before. But these ethical, legal and moral challenges are ones that concern us. And one of the second, I guess, in no particular order, but second design is around bias. So if we are looking at data sets that are of now, they reflect our society perhaps as it is hardwired now or whatever length of time the data set is looking at. And that has been used to train AI algorithms. Do we want to set in aspic our decision-making for the future? If we don't want to replicate the biases in society now, then how do we remove those biases from data sets? Where do we reset to? And these are very, very challenging questions. And of course, if you look into the black boxes and look at the component parts of any algorithm, that will also reflect the biases, interests, assumptions and motivations of the AI program or designer. So there is opportunity for multiplicity of interest and bias within this. At present, there are no universal professional standards for data science. And so this really raises some real concerns here that we need to start to set up standards for data developers in order to build confidence in the use of algorithmic systems. And I think this is particularly pertinent for legal contexts. At the moment, it is the wild west out there. And the best that we can see is organizations like Microsoft and Google who have set up some standards for self-regulation, which are no more really than high-minded principles about how they are going to develop their systems. And of course, not subject to any external or objective check or balance. So the role of ethics in the conduct of electronic interactions between people, businesses and things also raises challenges about the moral implications or the unintended consequences that can come from bringing together the technology of humans. Big data, cloud and autonomous systems provoke questions around security, around data privacy and really around fundamental human rights. Whilst AI and social media challenges as to how we value our work and how we value each other, we can talk later about digital identity. But let me say a little bit about liability because that clearly is a key concern for us. Where should liability lie when damage has occurred? The obvious example, there is autonomous vehicles that we can think of at any time that we are in contact with machine. AI systems are very likely to interact with other systems, the internet of things. So assigning liability becomes really challenging. And as I said before, they're fundamentally reliant upon the data on which they have been trained. So where do we start to attribute liability here? And of course, all AI systems are vulnerable to hacking. So there is a cybersecurity element to this as well. The global distribution of data centers, data sources and intelligent systems also means that there is limited control of data or intended consequences outside of our borders. So, a few, lots of really challenging questions. So we set up the Law Society, a technology and law policy commission which harnesses our convening power by offering a neutral platform for lawyers, technologists, academics, policymakers, ethicists and government to start to address these challenging ethical issues that we are now actively facing into. The commission is a year long exploration of the impact of technology and big data in the justice system. And we are particularly focusing on the use of algorithms in police decision making and asking ourselves questions around the use here and whether it's ethical, fair and free from bias and who is going to be liable if an algorithm proves to have negative or harmful consequences. I chair this commission, but my co-commissioners are a professor of ethics and a professor of computer science. So we're really trying to ensure that we bring all of the actors together because these challenging issues require no group thinking and many minds. The commission is taking written and oral evidence and we also have live sessions. So all of the information, it's all entirely public, is available on our website, including the video of our last session where we had 14 academics coming to give live evidence and answer questions in a sort of select committee environment. It made for quite interesting answers and a bit of good theater. So you can have a look at it if you're interested. Next one is on the 12th of November in the afternoon at the Law Society, where we'll be focusing on the tech community and what they think. And we've also, I think, got Lord Clement Jones, who is leading the Laws on Artificial Intelligence and the Chief Constable of Durham, whose force is using a tool called HEART, which is an algorithmic tool to determine whether an individual is released on bail or offered a rehabilitative program. So it's really interesting to get involved. When Arjun introduced me, he said that I chair a government panel and I wanted to tell you a little bit about the work that we are doing there. So this is set up by the Ministry of Justice. It's called the Law Tech Delivery Panel. I have on it the Chancellor of the High Court, Lord Keane, the government minister, Richard Susskin, Anna Donovan, who is a professor of blockchain UCL, two GECs, Sonia Branch from the Bank of England, and Rosemary Martin, who's the GEC of Vodafone. And what we are endeavoring to do is with full government backing, is to ensure that in the UK, we have an environment which is both nurturing but also vibrant for inward investment in relation to law tech, but also that we can grow the law tech businesses to scale. But its secondary purpose is equally important. These are the immediate aims of the panel, rather than the longer term aims, which will be looking at things like education, legal education and skills acquisition and what needs to change there to fit lawyers or want to be lawyers for the future. But immediately, we need to look at the regulatory and legislative framework and because of our common law jurisdiction, our precedence to ensure that this is also fit for decision making around distributed ledger technology, such as blockchain. I'm hoping that we will have some interesting cases coming to the roles building in the not too distant future, where we will test out and see whether our jurisdiction is fit for purpose in that. But I am relatively confident that the common law is a jurisdictionly, the right way to start to address the flexibility that we have within that start to address some rather challenging questions. The work that we're doing is through task forces and I chair the ethics task force and rely heavily upon the work that we're doing in the law society and the commission. But the other task forces are around commercial dispute resolution, the jurisdiction, regulation, investment, commercial dispute resolution and education. So we will be initially reporting at the beginning of next year as to the things that where the blockers are and where the opportunities are. It's also important I think in this space to think about access to justice and unmet legal need and how new technological development can ensure that ordinary people and even perhaps people at the vulnerable end of our society can actually access legal support. Sometimes I get shot down for this but I firmly believe that access to justice does not always necessarily need to be access to a lawyer and that with some really good technological support that we can ensure that people can self help which means that they can get to a point where either they resolve their issues themselves or they can identify that they have a clear and perhaps at that point complex legal issue where they need professional help and support. And again, this is something that we want to work with government more to ensure that thematically is also being addressed. One last thing on technology and what we're doing, we have partnered with Barclays Bank with about a dozen of our largest law firms, PWC and some academic institutions and this is a joint venture to build the first industry specific incubator which we launched in August in Notting Hill. The incubator has 16 law tech startups in it at the moment and we are developing that further. We aspire to have incubators across the country and indeed Barclays have, I think they already have an Eagle Labs incubator here in Cambridge but that's not law specific. The purpose of the incubators is to ensure that this is much more open sourced, that lawyers from any walk of life can engage and support and influence, co-create the development of products and services that are going to be useful into the future. So it's an opportunity to build a community and on the back of that we will be working hard to ensure that we can help to demystify technology because this is a real challenge for all of our lawyers in current practice. As lawyers we hate to ever admit or ever be seen to not know something and so therefore new technology is often avoided but actually we can get the lawyers up close to the technologies. They can see that this is actually really supports and helps their lives in terms of efficiencies, in terms of their own career development, in terms of your career development, hopefully you will not have to spend weeks upon weeks undertaking contract review due diligence and all those sort of things which are actually quite stressful as well as being boring because you miss that one part of that in that clause, then you're in real trouble. So let's automate all of that and let's get you doing the really interesting work and getting in front of the clients from day one. So that's a big piece of work that we're doing to try and support that. Conscious that I have run on a bit but I did start a little bit late, didn't I? And I just wanted to say to finish off with my point about internationalism. So the future of law, as I said before, technology is no respecter of boundaries of any nature whatsoever and those are legislative boundaries as well. And we as in the UK are very well placed to take advantage of all of these new developments. St. Louis is a global legal centre. London houses seven out of the 10 is home to seven out of the 10 largest global law firms. 87 out of the top 100 global law firms have a base in London. And despite what is said frequently from by competitive jurisdictions, Brexit, and I can't get through a single talk without saying the word, Brexit doesn't impact on this. Everything that makes our jurisdiction attractive remains. So the independence of our judiciary, the breadth and depth of experience of our legal professionals and also our common law and the sophistication of our common law all in place, Brexit or no. And it's quite important that we put that case now being clearly to our global audience. And we're doing that through a global legal centre campaign which is twinned with a government campaign around the legal services, the our great campaign. And I can see that in the future, as society transforms as well, it becomes smaller, that these opportunities to cement the UK as a leader and a trendsetter in legal services will increase. But there is absolutely no room for complacency here. We need to be pushing ourselves to be in the vanguard of technological developments to ensure that we have the right people in our profession to help us to support that and that we work together with colleagues from other professions and disciplines. Now, I'm not, in the least, trying to bang the drum. I am a true fought for just for the UK, a true internationalist and we will continue at the Law Society to work very closely with our colleagues in Europe and beyond because we have some huge and important common aims in that to safeguard the rule of law, to protect and promote access to justice and also the highest professional standards. So, I'm probably going to end there, I could say more, but I'm going to open the floor to questions or comments and thank you very much for listening so far.