Insights and Highlights from Legalweek 2024

We also used the event to repeat some of the highlights from a presentation that has been well-received at events in Europe: Empowering Citizen Developers – Giving Your Experts Control. Only this time, we were fortunate to be joined on stage by some Legito customers with their in-real-life perspective on the benefits they have seen from deploying tools that can be used by citizen developers.

Kathleen Leighton, from Canadian law firm Stewart McKelvey, Karen Fraser from PwC, and Matthew Mott from MRC contributed to an insightful look at the power that citizen developers can use to positively impact their organizations with the latest generation of automation tools.
Gartner defined the concept of a citizen developer (try our video from last year if it’s a new concept to you). They also forecast the era of low-code tools that make it possible for citizen developers to deliver results: tools like Legito. Citizen developers can emerge in any industry but we are seeing a rapid uptake by professional services organizations, including law firms, who want more ways to scale the impact of their subject matter experts in a market where clients want more than one-off advice billed by the hour.

Legalweek is a conference primarily for lawyers, but lawyers in corporate legal teams are also consumers of legal services. The consistent message from all our speakers was that modern tools (not just Legito, but of course we include Legito) are fulfilling the needs of both the professionals who deploy them and the end clients who use them. The chance to ‘build something’ themselves is increasingly appealing to experts, and the ability to deploy their solutions in a controlled environment is crucial in regulated professions where clients have non-trivial needs.

Our panel also explored the impact of AI integrated with automation tools. We considered headlines that speculate how AI tools will undermine the jobs of many white-collar workers, especially in knowledge-based industries. Doubtless change is coming (it was ever thus), but we think citizen developers will be at the junction where technology meets consumers of legal services. Citizen developers are the people with the skills and experience to understand best to use automation tools in combination with expertise and the ‘human in the loop’.

As a vendor, we naturally sing the benefits of the tools we sell, but Legalweek gave a chance for our customers, all from prominent respected organizations in professional services, to put their experience in front of their peers at the conference. Although they were all Legito customers (with thousands of users between them), the presentation wasn’t about Legito specifically. It was about professionals getting their hands on tools they could configure and deploy to meet the needs of their organization and their clients without reliance on developers, in a way that allows their experts to focus on the task, not the tool.

We enjoyed hearing how firms like PwC, Stewart McKelvey and MRC are incentivising the adoption of tech-based solutions among experts who were previously under pressure from regimes such as billing targets. Karen, from PwC, also explained how a massive organization like PwC can drive the adoption of tools while recognizing the individual opportunities of colleagues to contribute. Not everyone will be a citizen developer: for some colleagues it is enough to train and encourage them to be ‘savvy and responsible users’ of automation tools.

We are grateful to Stewart McKelvey, PwC and MRC for their generous contributions to the conference.

We also used the event to repeat some of the highlights from a presentation that has been well-received at events in Europe: Empowering Citizen Developers – Giving Your Experts Control. Only this time, we were fortunate to be joined on stage by some Legito customers with their in-real-life perspective on the benefits they have seen from deploying tools that can be used by citizen developers.

Kathleen Leighton, from Canadian law firm Stewart McKelvey, Karen Fraser from PwC, and Matthew Mott from MRC contributed to an insightful look at the power that citizen developers can use to positively impact their organizations with the latest generation of automation tools.
Gartner defined the concept of a citizen developer (try our video from last year if it’s a new concept to you). They also forecast the era of low-code tools that make it possible for citizen developers to deliver results: tools like Legito. Citizen developers can emerge in any industry but we are seeing a rapid uptake by professional services organizations, including law firms, who want more ways to scale the impact of their subject matter experts in a market where clients want more than one-off advice billed by the hour.

Legalweek is a conference primarily for lawyers, but lawyers in corporate legal teams are also consumers of legal services. The consistent message from all our speakers was that modern tools (not just Legito, but of course we include Legito) are fulfilling the needs of both the professionals who deploy them and the end clients who use them. The chance to ‘build something’ themselves is increasingly appealing to experts, and the ability to deploy their solutions in a controlled environment is crucial in regulated professions where clients have non-trivial needs.

Our panel also explored the impact of AI integrated with automation tools. We considered headlines that speculate how AI tools will undermine the jobs of many white-collar workers, especially in knowledge-based industries. Doubtless change is coming (it was ever thus), but we think citizen developers will be at the junction where technology meets consumers of legal services. Citizen developers are the people with the skills and experience to understand best to use automation tools in combination with expertise and the ‘human in the loop’.

As a vendor, we naturally sing the benefits of the tools we sell, but Legalweek gave a chance for our customers, all from prominent respected organizations in professional services, to put their experience in front of their peers at the conference. Although they were all Legito customers (with thousands of users between them), the presentation wasn’t about Legito specifically. It was about professionals getting their hands on tools they could configure and deploy to meet the needs of their organization and their clients without reliance on developers, in a way that allows their experts to focus on the task, not the tool.

We enjoyed hearing how firms like PwC, Stewart McKelvey and MRC are incentivising the adoption of tech-based solutions among experts who were previously under pressure from regimes such as billing targets. Karen, from PwC, also explained how a massive organization like PwC can drive the adoption of tools while recognizing the individual opportunities of colleagues to contribute. Not everyone will be a citizen developer: for some colleagues it is enough to train and encourage them to be ‘savvy and responsible users’ of automation tools.

We are grateful to Stewart McKelvey, PwC and MRC for their generous contributions to the conference.

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