Reflections on Canterbury Tech 2016: Disruption and Lawyers

It was great to participate in the Canterbury Tech Summit this year.  The overarching theme was about disruption and how it will impact work in the future.  We had a booth and had a good flow of people visiting and chatting about this topic and others.  Our interest in this area is how digital disruption will impact on lawyers and how we work in the future.  The event was sold out with around 650 people in attendance including a surprise visit from the Prime Minister who gave a speech about the IT industry in New Zealand and shared his thoughts on the future.

We noticed that from several different speakers there was a real message about “listening to your customer” when working out where your business was going.  That fit well with our theme of “hacking your service provider” which was really a message about what you can expect from service providers and how to get the most out of them in light of new technology and digital disruption.

At the end of the talk we wondered if there would be many questions and there were – always a good sign!  We enjoyed the discussion with people about topics like AI and how that will affect professionals as well as how lawyers will deal with new technology that pushes the boundaries of existing laws.  Our overall message was that disruption can actually improve the customer experience with professional services firms.  You should be challenging your service provider to explain how they will use the new ways of doing things to provider a more improved and efficient service to you.

For more on this topic see the following article that we wrote which outlines our views on this subject: http://innovate.parryfield.com/2016/09/13/digital-disruption-new-law/

We had been unsure what to expect from the Tech Summit but reflecting on the event it was a great opportunity to connect with others in the same sector and to chat to them about what they are doing.