In this captivating podcast episode, Chris Kitchener, Vice President of Product Management at Thomson Reuters, delves into the dynamic world of legal technology, offering valuable insights into AI, workflow automation, cloud services, and the pivotal role of platforms and partners in the legal tech landscape.

Thomson Reuters is a global provider of information, technology, and professional services to businesses and professionals in various industries, including legal, financial, and media.

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Dom Burch: Welcome back to Legal Tech Made Simple with me Dom Burch. I am not a techie, and I am not a lawyer, which makes me perfectly well-placed to help make legal tech simple. And I’m delighted this week on the podcast to be joined by Chris Kitchener, Vice President of Product Management at Thomson Reuters. He came from the high-Q world, so if you want to think about that while we’re going, he’s a driven product leader offering over 15 years of product strategy and project management expertise in large organizations. Well, he’s well qualified, there is no doubt. And he’s got some fascinating views about legal tech and how it sits in the big wide world. Chris, absolute delight to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much.

Chris Kitchener: Thank you very much, Dom.

Dom Burch: Now, tell us a little bit about how you ended up being a vice president. I always think that title’s fantastic, by the way. I always imagine you’re sort of wandering around in the Oval Office, but how did you become a VP of Product Management at Thomson Reuters? What was your route here? You went to university in Hertfordshire and did, I guess, computer programming back in the late ’80s, and early ’90s, which looks very different than it does today.

Chris Kitchener: It does, and actually, I have to be very careful because with that sort of poacher turned gamekeeper, I couldn’t write a line of code to save my life. But I like those things with flashing cursors and keyboards, and so I got involved in that. But actually, I had a really eclectic career, which got me to where I am. The Royal Navy, learning how to navigate helicopters. I’m weirdly a trained commercial pilot. But the bits that are probably more valuable are I spent 13 years at Adobe, including living for 10 years in Seattle, and I ran a bunch of towards the end of my career at Adobe, I ran two of their really large products used by actually a couple of million users. If people have ever heard of Adobe InDesign or Adobe Illustrator, and lots of interesting challenges and things learnt along the way, including how we moved. Do you remember there was a time when you paid for your software, and it was yours? At Adobe we moved from what they called perpetual, which was pay me once and it’s yours, to subscription. So that was quite exciting. There was a stop with a company called Alfresco where that was content management process. And then as you said HighQ three years ago and Thomson Reuters now.

Dom Burch: So, let’s talk about the now then. So how was, you know, because I guess having been at HighQ and then brought in by Thomson Reuters, I guess there’s a whole load of integration and plugging together. And it’s been a theme, hasn’t it, over the last year, 18 months, ever since I’ve been involved in this area, just seeing how some of the big players are beginning to have that real end-to-end enterprise solution. And for the listeners out there who might not be on the legal tech journey yet, I guess the point is, that you can come to the likes of Thomson Reuters now and go, this is where we’re at, can you help us? And the answer’s going to be yes.

Chris Kitchener: I think that’s probably the most important. That idea of organizations that can help you from soup to nuts, and do it in one simple way, is super, super, super important.

So, that is the first thing, which is… The first thing that the industry is doing is seeing people come together in organizations like TR and others as well. But there are a couple of other interesting things. The first one, which is if you want to predict what’s going to happen in legal tech, the first thing is to go look at enterprise.

Because I think that my experience coming into HighQ and Thomson Reuters is that honestly, the conversations we’re having now in the legal world are the conversations people were having in enterprise five years ago. So, we’re starting to use the term digital transformation. Actually, that’s old hat and people are bored of that in enterprise. So, if you want to know what’s coming, what’s really exciting, and this is one of the reasons why I was really keen to join HighQ is that legal tech is really blooming.

Every day I read about new startups doing the startup thing. They succeed, they fail, they consolidate, but it’s not a dirty word anymore. And I’ve got friends who are lawyers. I hope they listen to this as well. But I think tech used to be a dirty word in the legal sort of world and to be hired as a legal tech personal or legal expertise was something you didn’t hear much of. And yet now you’re starting to hear more and more firms see that as a critical part of their success. And it’s a real thing. And I think we’re contractually obliged to say the word code in this. But there is something really interesting and important to cover when I talk about digital transformation. In enterprise, effectively, they got to choose when and if they wanted to transform themselves. But the really interesting thing about COVID-19 is now it’s not something that you choose to do, whether you transform and engage digitally. Now, I mean, I don’t want to overblow this, but it’s kind of a matter of life and death. You either succeed with your legal technology or you don’t and if you want any proof of that, it is how many people magically in the last three months have said, have you heard about this thing called Teams and when they had never heard of that before and they never would have considered doing this before.

So yeah, you know enterprise that’s the place to go look for what’s coming next, and that’s the path we’re taking. Legal tech is blooming, and that is fantastic for clients, law firms, and corporate legal teams. And it’s a real thing where I’m pleased to see people are investing in it and spending time on it as well. So, those are some of the things I see at the moment that are not sort of purely AI tech or this or that. But just in terms of that is the trend I’m seeing, and that’s really what we follow and think about when we’re building some of our things.

Dom Burch: So let me understand this. So, I’m not a techie. So, I imagine right High Q comes along and you open up the bonnet, kind of get the jump leads and you stick it next to contract express. And you kind of try and plug these things in together. Now, do those things fit neatly when you’re, you know, when you’re trying to configure or trying to take aspects of one product and introduce it to another product, help me understand how that actually works in real life.

Chris Kitchener: Well, I was going to say, interestingly, was your question for me, is it easy to do as a technologist building it? Was it easy for a client? So, the answer is, that it’s really difficult as a technologist. You work with all these different technologies built at different times in different ways. But what we’re trying to do is make it super simple for customers. And that… Is the magic of this, which says, listen, HighQ has this set of sort of connected capabilities that we’ve designed so that a lawyer or a knowledge manager or whoever it might be in the business can say, I want to get a file from that person over there, move it over here, then I want a workflow to automatically trigger the creation of another document and then email it over there. So, the whole magic of this, and actually this is quite an interesting sort of take on this blossoming market, is it’s fantastic because there are lots of choices, but it’s really difficult because law firms have to figure out how to wire all of these things together back to that point about them not being sort of technologists by nature, that’s really difficult to do. So, I’d like to think we’re beginning to make it easier. Certainly, within HighQ. That’s where it all came from. That’s where it started this sort of platform of capabilities. But as we start looking forward, not just sort of in the next 6 or 12 months, but for the next 2,3,4,5 years. The magic is when we can connect all these disparate systems and not necessarily make the same UI, because I think that’s what people think it is, but make them fit together really easily. Oh, I’ve made a document. It should just land where I keep all my documents, or someone’s filled in a form well then something magically is watching on the system, and it does something with that form. So that really is the magic. That’s the prospect. That’s the possibility. It’s up to companies like us and people like me and my team to try and go away and build that. It’s a work in progress.

Dom Burch: And does it ever frustrate you and your team that, you know, numpties like me have no idea what goes in behind the scenes in order to make something elegant, easy to use, intuitive? I mean, because as a business user, if I’m going to be, let me be rude for a moment, we don’t really care about the tech.

Chris Kitchener: Does it frustrate us? Because we’re human beings, oh my god, yes. I mean, but what you often don’t hear us say in public is when someone says, this is really stupid, I have to press two buttons to make this thing happen. And what’s going on in our head is we’re screaming; you do not understand how difficult it was to make it two buttons to make it easy for you. That’s what goes on in the back of our heads like anyone does in whatever their profession. And I suspect that’s true when, when idiots like me go to lawyers and say, why is this contract so complicated? Thanks, Chris. You, thanks to carry on. The reality is though, we’re supposed to make the hard stuff easy. And so no, it doesn’t frustrate me because that is what we’re here to do. We’re here to take non-technologists and make it so they don’t have to know what bloody button to push to make it work. That’s the magic of it all. And it is difficult. And it’s hard. And it takes time. And often we kind of say, listen, it was like climbing Mount Everest to get these two things to work together. And sadly, Mount Everest still isn’t enough. We still have to go further. So no, you don’t frustrate us. Actually, that is what it’s all about. And that’s the standard we’ve got to hold ourselves to. And it’s difficult, and it takes time, but you should never feel bad that you’re not a technologist. Look, the legal professionals we work with… are legal professionals. They’re not tech professionals. So, yeah, it’s hard though. It is hard. And every time you think you’ve got so far forward, one of them, and you can describe it either as a joy or a challenge, is that people go, that’s great, but now can you make it do this? Just shows why it’s such an interesting area to be in.

Dom Burch: Absolutely. And just going back to your point about teams, actually, I was talking to Olga, who works for us over in Russia, and we were laughing that I helped her Pizza Hut team at the time learn how to use Teams, like 18 months ago, and the thing that actually captured people’s imagination was being able to blur the background on a video conference for the first time ever with a touch of a button. But once they were hooked on one bit of functionality, once they went, oh, that’s interesting, I like that. It led them down the path of being curious about what else can it do. There must be aspects, I guess, within Thomson Reuters now, and HighQ as a good example, where people go, this is really easy to use, and it’s made my life a bit easier, and oh, it’s all in one place! Oh, fantastic! And it just looks like a website, so I kind of know how to use it.

Chris Kitchener: The Teams thing is really interesting, so I can’t tell you how many people have come up, and if some of you listeners know what HighQ does, people saying, well, I use Teams now, so I’m not expecting we need to use HighQ. The truth is, that Teams was designed for a very, very specific and narrow use case. It was, I want everyone in this channel to talk to everyone, see everything, and do everything. And where HighQ comes from is this different area that says no, no, in the legal world, it is highly compartmentalized. It’s all about only the people who can see a thing can see a thing. So, there’s a difference. There are two different use cases. But what I think is interesting is two bits.

The first bit from what I do every day, is how do we connect the world of teams to the world of HighQ? We have lots of interesting and cunning plans for that. But going back to the point you were making, there’s now a bunch of people who would say. Technology is not relevant to me. You know what? I have an oak-panelled office. I get my clients to come in. I take him out for dinner, and that’s how we do business. What teams have done is taken a bunch of people who perhaps would have never thought of the value of technology and because they were forced to use it to your point. Now they’re saying, well, hang on a minute. If teams can do this for me, a technology from Thomson Reuters or HighQ do for me. And I think that the biggest mistake win for our industry is that Teams is really valuable and interesting. But now there’s a whole new group of people saying, ah, I didn’t die when I use technology and it turns out it was awkward to learn it and it was a bit embarrassing. But oh my God, I would never go back. And I think that’s a really important lesson for the whole industry. And honestly, if companies like Thomson Reuters and HighQ, you don’t capitalize on that. It is the case if you think Teams is cool. Come see what other technology we’ve got. That’s even more powerful and really makes the difference. So, it’s kind of an interesting time. Who knew COVID would have this kind of effect on things?

Dom Burch: Dom Burch: And I guess one of the things that we pride ourselves on is having people like Anna Lolua, who are kind of HighQ queen, I think of Anna as, because she’s been with you on that journey, and been at the cold edge, cold front, helping companies like HSBC and others actually get the best out of the tool. And I guess also find new use cases, new ways, new problems. She’s probably one of those people that Everest gets a little bit bigger every time Anna picks up the phone with the HighQ team and says, well, it’s great that it does that guys, but also we now need it to do this. I mean, actually having a partner and this, this is a bit self-gratuitous here, but having a partner alongside your teams, helping organizations actually get the thing to work and for people to adopt it. It is part of the puzzle, isn’t it?

Chris Kitchener: Well, look, gratuitous or not, if you hadn’t mentioned it, I would have mentioned it because I think the whole point is, and this is a broader point that I wanted to make, which is law firms need to think of themselves as technology firms. And I know there are probably several lawyers listening, choking, hearing that, but it’s absolutely true. But the point is a law firm’s expertise and its IP, and its value is in the legal aspect. It’s not in the IT aspects. And so actually, companies like SYKE, it’s important that you’re there to help people through this because people don’t know what they don’t know. And so having partners to guide you through that. I mean, just that simple thing you said. Actually, we were talking to you, I was on a call with you and a client where they talked about HighQ as the Swiss Army Knife and every week they think of a new use case. Well, that’s great because that client’s pretty sophisticated. But actually, there are lots of clients who say, I don’t know what it can do for me. So actually, the value of having partners like yourselves who have been there, seen it, done it. No 20 use cases without even blinking. Actually, that’s important to me as a technologist that you’re there to help bridge the gap and sort of move people up that maturity curve and knowledge curve as fast as we can.

Dom Burch: Now, I’m going to ask you your, this is your crystal ball moment. And you’ve got the ability that you’re already six or 12 months in front of where we all are because you’re working on the roadmap, you know what’s around the corner. Now I’m not asking you to give away any trade secrets. But just in terms of maybe let’s broaden out from HighQ and TR. As you look at the legal tech market, the arena, whatever you want to call it, how do you think see things shaping up, and playing out in the next 12 months? Now, hopefully, we’ll be coming out the back of the worst of the pandemic. You know, we’ve got the vaccine coming and good signs that that’s going to be effective and some sense of normality. But where do you see things playing out?

Chris Kitchener: This is the bit where I normally twitch when I’m listening and someone comes on and says, ah, I don’t know. I can tell you what I’m thinking about and working on, and I hope that’s kind of useful, which is, number one is more AI, and not because I think AI is going to solve world hunger or replace lawyers. It’s just about doing things better and faster than it did before. So, a better search. Can I give you better results or can I extract more information from your documents? But the bit that I’m interested in is not just about searching documents. It’s about AI across all of our platforms and technology. So, an example, I’m going to talk about this in a second, about automation, because I think that’s a huge thing that’s coming, is let’s pretend a client builds an automated workflow. AI can say, I can make it better. So actually, AI is everywhere. That’s the thing for not 6,12 months. But frankly, again, the next couple of years is AI everywhere. But don’t worry, it’s not it will solve world hunger kind of AI. This is you almost don’t know it’s there. It’s just an underlying technology because no one really cares that we use Java. Why should you care we use AI. It’s the same thing. The second one, and a little bit of this, frankly, comes from my time in the enterprise world, which is more workflow automation. I cannot overstate how big this is. Right now, with COVID, people want to cut costs but make a better experience. Automating workflows is massively valuable in terms of saving money, but also in terms of creating a fantastic experience for your client. And Chris, what do you mean by workflow automation?

How many people here have to send a report to a client on a Friday night? Some paralegal has to go around the business, gather a bunch of data, often via email, maybe via Excel, if they’re feeling fancy, and then have to remember before they go home at five o’clock to create this report and send it. That is the perfect thing that a workflow automation process can do. So workflow automation is massive, massive, massive. And again, not just because it saves time that paralegal doesn’t need to spend 20 minutes working on that or that that lawyer. But in terms of the experience for the client, because guess what? Nobody ever forgets to send it. Nobody is ever late sending it. Nobody ever makes a mistake so workflow cloud. More cloud. So, HighQ is SAAS, we’re in cloud with private cloud. The public cloud is really interesting. Again, go follow the enterprise they’ll tell you. The reason why I care about it though is because ultimately, it’s like saying, have you seen my computer? It’s a really interesting computer. Look, I’ve got a new computer. Nobody cares. What’s interesting about cloud, is the new possibilities it offers me as a person building products and you as clients in terms of what we can do with it. So, for example, traditionally, storage is one price you buy storage. Yeah, but if we connect the cloud, the public cloud, we can offer you hot storage, warm storage, and cold storage, and we can offer you different pricing for that. So, more services that come with public cloud and more flexibility is interesting. The penultimate one is investment in legal technology and product management. So clearly, me coming on this podcast is about maintaining the business of product management because we need to keep that business going. I don’t mean that because what I really mean is law firms need to think like technology companies. So, you said something fantastic earlier. You said, you know, partners like SYKE can help and talk about use cases. You know, at some point we want law firms to be self-sufficient. We want law firms to say, I’m going to be able to go across my law firm and I’m going to have the skills and the tools to understand the problems they have and then apply that back using the technology we have in-house.

So, I was a legal geek, I think it was last year. It might have even been the year before. I met lots of interesting people and I could point to them and say, you’re a product manager. They went, no, I’m not and then they inserted some weird title. They were product managers. So, investment in legal product management inside law firms to better understand the technology you have and apply it. And again, partners like you, like SYKE are really valuable to help bring that skill and that expertise when there aren’t those product managers. But frankly, help start to create that skill in-house. And the last one, you can tell I thought about this before I came on the podcast, more platforms and more partners. And to be honest, we’ve already talked about this a bit before but which is legal tech is great. And there’s more and more legal tech out there. So, isn’t that awesome? Every partner is now coming to their IT department and demanding they buy this solution or that solution. It’s great. More flexibility. People diving headfirst. But disconnected legal technology actually can very quickly become a disaster. We’ve got 20 solutions, none of them connected, they all do different things, and nobody wants to manage that many solutions. And frankly, you can’t do the really clever and powerful things if they’re not connected. So, this is honestly me talking about HighQ because this is what I think about every day. HighQ, we think of it as this platform of interconnected capabilities that can be quickly reused, reassembled, and twisted around, you know, we use the cliche of Lego building blocks, but it’s actually true. The bit that we think is valuable is you use it once you learn how to use it, you get your users comfortable with it. Next week, use exactly the same technology, exactly the same experience to solve a very different problem. So, start to think about platforms. You know, people love Microsoft, Amazon, and Google in part because they build this wide range of technology, which is “Connected.” We do that, but we do that without you having to be developers at the same time. And then lastly, that point about partners, which is this is complicated stuff. This is hard stuff. And so, find the right partners. Now, there’s an element of vendors being partners but actually, organizations like SYKE I can’t tell you how important they are to us. Beyond that to our clients, in terms of you can have the most awesome technology in the world but if you don’t know how to use it, you don’t know how to apply it or deploy it, it’s kind of worthless. So, that was my last one. Platform, more platforms, more partners. There you go. That’s my prognostication which I’ll all be slightly embarrassed about when I listen back to this in a month or two’s time.

Dom Burch: Right, sounds good to me. Chris Kitchener, Vice President of Product Management at Thomson Reuters. Thank you so much for taking the time and joining us on Legal Tech Made Simple. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Chris Kitchener: Pleasure as well. Thank you for having me.