Europe Innovative Lawyers Awards 2024: the winners

The FT [? Innovative ?] [? Lawyers ?] programme is a global series of awards, special reports, global conferences that covers innovation in the entire legal profession. And we take a big focus on the winners at a big event at the Natural History Museum. What keeps General Counsel up at night. Most of them would say geopolitical risk. In fact, many general counsels say that they are dealing far more with geopolitical risk than legal risk.

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We've now been living with generative AI since November 2022, and the latest FT report in Europe shows the profession coming to grips with it. Law firms are experimenting madly still, but the hype cycle, the fear cycle is diminishing. Most of the lawyers that we speak to, they see it as taking away low-level, mundane tasks. They see it as improving work-life balance. And most importantly, they see it as improving access to justice for two thirds of the world's population that don't have it.

Most law firm leaders are beginning to obsess about their data strategies. They're realising that AI is the railway train, and the data is the tracks that that train is going to run on. With AI coming in and removing low-level tasks and a lot of the work that junior lawyers do between the years of one to five, older lawyers wonder, how will they get that judgement? And this is no doubt a debate that will rage in the profession for some time-- this idea of data-enhanced knowledge versus intuition and judgement.

Every year, we feature 10 individuals in the FT [? Innovative ?] [? Lawyers ?] Report. In the latest European report, the winning individual was a lady called Marion Palmer, who works at Hogan Lovells. The interesting thing about Marion Palmer is that she is neither a partner nor a lawyer. She's actually a scientist. The law is not just about lawyers and that actually, to create innovative solutions for clients, you need multidisciplinary teams, lots of other professionals who help enhance the legal profession.

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