AI & Legal Tech: Do Law Firms and General Counsel See the Future Differently?

Professor Richard Susskind CBE KC (Hon) is author of ‘How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed’, a speaker and independent adviser to international professional firms, general counsel, judiciaries, and national governments. His main area of expertise is the future of legal service, with particular reference to the impact of information technology. He has specialised in legal technology since the early 1980s and his views have influenced a generation of lawyers and legal technologists around the world.

He has written numerous books, including Expert Systems in Law (Oxford, 1987), The Future of Law (Oxford, 1996), Transforming the Law (Oxford, 2000), The End of Lawyers? (Oxford 2008), Tomorrow’s Lawyers (Oxford, 2013), and (co-author, Daniel Susskind). The Future of the Professions (Oxford, 2015). He has written around 150 columns as a columnist for The Times and he is Founding Editor of the International Journal of Law and Information Technology. His work has been translated into 12 languages.

Richard is President of the Society for Computers and Law and, since 1998, he has been IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. From 2003 until 2008, he was Chair of the UK’s Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information (a non-departmental public body set up by the Cabinet Office in 2003, and now part of the Ministry of Justice). He is Chair of the Advisory Board, and Visiting Professor in Internet Studies, at the Oxford Internet Institute in the University of Oxford. Richard is also Chair of the Online Dispute Resolution Group of the Civil Justice Council of England and Wales, Special Adviser to the Canadian Bar Association, and IT Adviser to the Jersey Legal Information Board

Richard has been widely recognized by the legal industry, he is an Honorary Professor at the Law School in University College London, Emeritus Law Professor at Gresham College in London, and a part-time law professor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

Richard has a first class honours degree in law from Glasgow University and a doctorate in law and computers from Balliol College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was awarded an OBE in the Millennium New Year’s Honours List by Her Majesty the Queen for services to IT in the Law and to the Administration of Justice.

Christian worked at HSBC for over 13 years, as deputy-general counsel global banking and markets and HSBC Bank plc. Christian began his career at Linklaters, before moving in-house to Citigroup and then Credit Suisse. Christian has led large global teams across several asset classes, recently focused on Securities Services and building a global in-house alternative legal service provider.

Kristin joined DISCO in 2018 and has held various leadership roles including in professional services, client success, and, most recently, as Vice President of Product Strategy. Before her tenure at DISCO, she spent nearly eight years at Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters, where she oversaw the Ediscovery project management and operations team.
Kristin began her career in the early 2000s as a consultant in litigation support and ediscovery, managing significant litigation and regulatory projects for multinational corporations and their legal teams.
She earned her Bachelor of Science in Economics from Miami University in Ohio and holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Tom is a Partner in Osborne Clarke’s Commercial Disputes team and advises clients on complex disputes and investigations.

Tom acts for clients across Osborne Clarke’s sectors, with a focus on financial and professional services and digital business. Tom spends the majority of his time working for large professional and financial services clients on business critical disputes, and also has extensive experience working for emerging and established technology companies. The disputes that Tom advises upon often have an international element, and Tom has recently advised clients on multi-million dollar disputes with connections to the US, India, Morocco, Lebanon and Europe.

Tom also has detailed experience of obtaining and defending injunctions and claims relating to employees exiting businesses and on team moves.

In addition to handling disputes, Tom works closely with clients on both sensitive internal and regulatory investigations, and he has particular recent experience dealing with investigations and enforcement action by the UK’s Financial Reporting Council.