Episode 13 - Brian Inkster

[00:00] my guest today in the your Law Firm success podcast is Brian inkster Brian is a very well Kent figure and as he describes himself or his firm has being an overnight success that’s taken 25 years in this discussion we cover Brian’s use of Technology his development of plug-in play law which is a hub and spoke approach for consultant solicitors to work under the inksters brand but effectively run their own practice with the fees sharing Arrangement and then we have a really good chat about it Brian has become somewhat known in LinkedIn as a voice against the hype and it’s it was really good to get his take on that which I think will resonate with quite a lot of you so enjoy and thanks for listening all right well Brian thank you very much for coming in today it’s a pleasure to see you on this  unusual really sunny Scottish day you’re a very well as you say in Scotland you’re a well Kent figure particularly within the Scottish legal scene and I’m sure Beyond as a result of your profile on LinkedIn and other social channels Twitter you were a very early adopter of that I seem to remember can we still call it that now  well I would still call it that but  I’ve left as part of The Exodus and going to Bluesky right okay so I haven’t I haven’t joined that yet you have been known for a number of years for your approach to Innovation and deployment of Technology MH as a legal services provider but your background is perhaps a bit more interesting and give some Clues as to why you’ve gone down the route you have done so perhaps you could tell us a bit more about that and about inksers in general as a law firm how you established it where it came from before we go on to talk a bit more about its innovation okay so the kind of history is that I come originally from Shetland  and moved to edinburgh to study law in 1985 and came through to Glasgow in 1990/1991 I think it was seems a long time ago now doesn’t it yes to do my trade ship for a change of scenery and I thought at the time I was maybe going to be here for just a couple of years doing the training ship I could then move on elsewhere but this often happens you end up not getting stuck because that’s the wrong word to say but being comfortable where you’re at and staying in the place that you’re at so I’ve been in Glasgow since the early 1990s  and I did a trainee ship with a firm in Glasgow became an assistant and then an associate there and I was in that firm for about 8 years and was building up a client base where the majority of those clients at the time were from Shetland which kind of surprised me because that’s not what I expected to happen but I would get family friends referrals coming to me from Shetland want me to do legal work and it didn’t seem to be a problem doing the legal work from Glasgow at Shetland even back then even though the internet was in its in its infancy people were still quite happy to speak on the phone and I would make trips up to Shetland which I’d be doing anyway to see family and friends but also specific trips to see clients and it just seemed to grow and I was getting people contacting me about all sorts of things and I built up a practice but it was getting to a stage that I was feeling I wasn’t getting to support from The Firm I was at to enable me to grow the business further I was kind of working every hour that was sent to me and feeling that I needed sort of more hands and support to enable me to grow the business that I was in and like a lot of firms Partnerships The Firm was looking more at the partner’s retirements rather than the future of the firm you know and so they were happy for me to just bring the fees in to chug away and carry on doing what I was doing without spending money to enable me to grow more of a business within the business so I felt my only options at the time and that was in 19  99 was to either go to another firm  stick out where I was at or set up on my own so that was really the driver for me setting up my own firm because I probably realised at the time that going to another traditional Law Firm was probably just going to be much of a muchness and I’d be in the same sort of situation and not being very happy about where I was at so I took the plunge and set up inksters on the 1st of May 1999 and at that time it was just me and a a and a secretary who came with me from The Firm I was in and I gradually built the firm by taking on trainee solicitors taking on assistants taking on extra staff and so it grew gradually but I found that when you’re looking to grow The Firm from the lower levels by taking on young assistants or trainees it’s a long and slow process you a trainee ship is two years then they become an assistant in The Firm there then getting you know if they’re a good solicitor they’re doing well but it’s taken a while to get to that stage and it’s involved a lot of effort and training to get them there and then inevitably they decide to go off somewhere else and that’s not because they don’t like working at inksters it’s because there’s a big bright world out there and they want to see more of that world and that’s you know increasingly more the case that people don’t have the staying power to stay in one place for a long time I think there’s lots of Statistics that show that that show that you know somebody will stay in a job typically for several years but not for Life  maybe at one point in the in the dark history of law firms people would see you know they life in the law firm from when they did the trainee ship until they became a partner  and you also you’re seeing people who are changing careers so they’ve decided I’ve done my bit in law I’m off to do something else  and you know there are several solicitors who did the trainee ships at inksters who are no longer in the law they’ve gone off and done something else so you feel at times that you’re taking two steps forward and three back and then you’re having to start again and it was really that process and although we were growing and we were you know the Firm was growing and becoming more successful it wasn’t happening at a great pace and it was 12 years ago that I saw the changes happening in England and Wales through the legal services Act and the fact that there as a result of the legal services ACT people were looking at how they could do law differently and there were different models and things arising in England and in some cases experiments that failed and Tesco law yeah things and things yeah Tesco law was how it was often described people thought wrongly that the supermarkets would enter the law because they allowed non solicitors to come into to owning law firms and that just didn’t happen as such and you know there’ been plenty of failures along the way but there’s been successes in England and Wales with different models arising and one thing that I saw happening was the fees sharing model where firms were looking after the overall support Insurance technology m marketing for lawyers but bringing in self-employed solicitors who worked under the umbrella and shared the fees with the law firm and that’s to me seemed like an a sensible concept and you’re thinking why did no one do this before I think there had been maybe pockets of it happening but it hadn’t been done to any great extent and it actually is quite similar to how the faculty of Advocates have operated for hundreds of years where all the Advocates  in the faculty of Advocates are self-employed but they have Stables where they employ clerks and administrative staff that they work under and they pay them a share of their fees in the same way as barristers operate in England so I thought why don’t we try this  I mean in England and Wales a lot of this had come out of  alternative business structures being allowed an outside investment being allowed and non solicitors being allowed to own firms but I couldn’t see any reason why in Scotland where we didn’t have that ability why a solicitor couldn’t set up that type of model so with that in mind that’s what I decided to do and we did that coming up for 12 years ago now and we’ve grown that again gradually because we’ve been able to bring in more senior people who have a client following and to begin with because we wanted to make sure all the support and how it all worked was functioning properly rather than trying to run before we could walk and I didn’t make a song and dance about it we just people got to hear that this is what we were doing and we brought people in and have kind of grown it grown it quite steadily over the years and for a while we were operating a hybrid setup where we had employed solicitors and we had self employed [10:00] Consultants but we really moved kind of during the pandemic or as we were coming out of the pandemic away from that and now we’re wholly operating on the fee sharing model and we now have about 20 Consultants with us and  We’ve started earlier this year marketing that more and we’re in discussions with a with quite a number at the moment of people who are interested in the model and I think there’s more of a realisation that this sort of model exists and it’s an option for solicitors to look at and it’s not going to suit everyone but it’s there’s a certain type of solicitor that it will suit so to go back you initially bringing the work from Shetland which one would be a surprise for quite a lot of people because and certainly at that time it would be assumed that in order to for a general practice solicitor you’d need to be within the community that you were serving the second thing and we’ve discussed that before is that and it was a recent episode with joy Kingsley where she talked about growing jmw and others through lateral hiring effectively which was bringing in people with significant experience in the case following but that takes quite a lot of money MH if you’re going to employ them and I support you know you were looking at it and going well actually these trainees they don’t have a customer they don’t have a network and then as a firm you’re having to spend effort to bring in the clients to supply them with the clients so they can do the work yeah so that’s probably quite challenging so the combination of things combined with the fact that there’s also this model beginning to appear which  was it the pinsent Masons was that what the first one that was with the kind of have a different sort of model because they more I believe I may be speaking out of turn here but they more Supply lawyers more to companies on a kind of ad hoc basis as a kind of what did he call it more a kind of freelance model but it’s not quite the same because that’s where pinsent Mason have work through clients to give to people and it’s more like allocating a solicitor to a company where they go in house and they work for them I believe that’s the model yeah it’s more you know the bigger ones in England that started out doing this were the likes of gunner cooke and The Name Escapes Me Now why is it gone setfords are now doing it yeah but you know there were several firms who started off doing that and have built up and some of them have like 400 solicitors now operating under them and I was seeing those firms you know doing it  Keystone law that was the one I was thinking of I think Keystone law and gunner cooke were two of the main early ones doing it and both of them I think have over 400 solicitors at the moment doing it but there’s a lot of other firms set up in England doing the same thing you know there’s probably a good 10 or more that are operating that model at a bit of scale and a lot of other ones doing it at smaller scale and we discussed this prior to actually commencing the recording the reasons as to why that’s a model that’s taken off more in England and in Scotland could you go into that a bit more in terms of investment and ownership Etc I think it arose in England on the back of Legal Services act which now must be I can’t remember what date that was but it must be a good 15 years or so ago and the I think it’s when the legal services act came into being and owed non lawyers to own law firms there was a lot of people looking at how they could do things differently as I said earlier and this was one of the models that came out of that although as I also said earlier I couldn’t see any reason why that wasn’t a model that had developed without alternative business structures and without outside investment but clearly outside investment allows growth and allows those firms to grow faster because they get money pumped into them that wouldn’t happen otherwise so their ability to grow faster is there which we’ve not gotten Scotland because unfortunately in Scotland although there was a similar Legal Services act in Scotland  about 12 or more years ago so you’ve effectively in comparison with some of those companies you’ve been bootstrapping inksters and have moved entirely to this I think was called the plug-and play model I used the word plug-and play law on the basis that lawyers can come along and plug into our infrastructure that we’ve set up and just get on and play and start concentrating on doing the law and letting us take a care of a lot of the bureaucracy involved and the things involved in running a law firm so they don’t need to do that and most lawyers went into law to do law not necessarily to become business people but a lot of them end up having to become business people maybe unwillingly because they come become Partners in law firms and have to take on all that that entails  but there’s a lot of lawyers out there that just want to concentrate on doing the law and serving clients and have somebody take care of the other stuff for them which is what we can do and what about you what about me yeah in in that regard because you started off obviously as a lawyer became business owner so then moving into business now you’re operating an almost entirely different model where do you sit in terms of your management versus legal work well I’m trying to avoid doing legal work if I can but I keep getting hauled into things that I have specialities in such as crofting law and the law of Servitudes and I don’t mind doing  bits of that just to keep my hand in hand and keep me mentally active as far as the law goes but certainly as the firm has grown I have stopped doing a lot of day-to-day legal work and concentrated more on the management of the business  and at the moment my concentration is really on growing the business but by bringing in more consultant  solicitors on dealing with the financial aspects of the business and the marketing of the business  and we brought in a year ago  or over a year ago a chief operating officer for the first time to concentrate more on the management of the employed staff the back office support the technology and the general running of the offices you know the so you mentioned that the outset around technology obviously that’s a that’s a major part for you in in order to deliver this plug-and play law model you know it has to be an almost seamless entry can you tell us a bit more about your approach to Tech I’ve always had an interest in technology from an early stage and I suppose it goes back to even just as a school boy having a dragon computer and then a BBC micro-computer and so on so I’ve always had a kind of Interest in in using computers and when you get into the law that probably develops and  when I set up inksters in 1999 I saw it as very important at day one to have a good practice management system that dealt with both accounts and dealt with  client record management and case management and I invested a lot of money at day one in just having all of that and I think that said was in a really good state by having a a good system in the early days and keeping enhancing and improving that as time went on and when you see things developing and changing in technology and the law trying to adapt to it where necessary and I think there  sometimes it’s not necessary just to chase after the next shiny new toy and I’m sure we’ll come on to discuss that but for example we are doing with  plug-and-play law we have a network of solicitor in 12 different locations throughout Scotland now and it was that wouldn’t have worked without the cloud and we were an early adopter of a cloud technology and moving all our systems into the cloud and we did that in 2011 and you know there were lots of firms scurrying around during the pandemic to do that because they had on premises yeah equipment and so on and  I think being an early adopter of moving into the cloud was important because it allowed  us to really have Consultants listers working anywhere and  also we were early adopter AIP phone technology so we had that about the same time which allowed solicitors to be operating in the rural locations around Scotland but still connecting through a the our sort of switchboard in for structure [20:00] which made life quite seamless for them and allowed the support from the Glasgow  Hub to the various spokes outside Glasgow I suppose as a result of the model you’ve ended up both being keen on it and adopting it and from an individual solicitor’s point of view you know what should they expect when they come and join this model they should expect all the kind of support that they would have in a traditional law firm and hopefully a little bit more  I mean we’ve had solicitors surprised by the kind of level of Technology we’re deploying compared with what they’ve been used to for example I basically coined the phrase because it wasn’t in use as far as I’m aware before that when we introduced to the firm a number of years ago a legal process engineer and that’s because I saw a need to have someone who was properly implementing the case management system we had within the firm most law firms will buy off the shelf a case management system and then they never properly implemented yeah they use about 10% of it m if that if that that probably less and a lot of it becomes what sometimes referred to shelfware where it’s just really sitting on the shelf unused Gathering and usually that’s down to the sister just not having the time themselves to spend on making that technology work for them in a way that makes them more efficient because they’re concentrating on their next job you know they’re concentrating on getting the law done and generating fees and in small practices especially they’ve not got the extra manpower to be dedicated on doing that and unless the solicitor like myself has a particular interest in technology and efficiencies and seeing you know how that can all work  and are willing to spend their spare time shall we say when they’re not doing their fee earning work doing that it’s just not going to happen and I think you find that in law firms up and down the country that they might have technology they may have purchase technology but they’re just not really implementing it in the way that they could and should and so I saw the answer being bringing in someone who could just be dedicated to that task  and so we brought in a legal process engineer and I called them a legal process engineer because I saw the need for looking specifically at processes  you know what does a lawyer do in a day when they’re [30:00] dealing with a convening transaction where does it start where does it finish and in between that what’s all the steps that they take and how can we use technology to make that process more efficient and you know with a good case management system it’ll if document automation where you can put in the variables once but have lots of templates set up that just pull them in yeah so for a convening transaction you’ll have the names of the parties you’ll have the property address you’ll have the price you’ll have the title number from register of Scotland you’ll have a date of Entry those are the variables but a lot of the documentation that are used throughout the transaction stay the same and if you can get that all set up it means that you can go through a transaction much more efficiently by just clicking on buttons and documents appearing and being automatically filled yeah but there’s lots of listers out there that’ll be still calling up a template that they’ve got copying and pasting and typing in stuff over and over again the same thing in various documents with also the potential error because each time they input the same information in different documents there could be typographical errors or so on if you make sure in our system that the data is correct first time around it’ll always appear the same way each time you do a different part of that transaction and this we talked about that before I think mentioned this before in relation to Digby Brown who I worked with as a trainee in their very early adoption of work flows and Automation and so recently oh and for those of you who spend any time LinkedIn or interest in this subject you’ll notice that Brian has been railing against to a certain extent some of the enthusiasm or hype around AI and I think it goes back to this automation Point does it not yeah I mean I think you know maybe not rail against it is maybe railing against the hype surrounding it I’ve got no problem with new technology coming along that’s going to assist us and augment what we’ve already got and make our lives easier but it seems that the whole generative AI thing and I’ll say generative AI because that’s you know a couple years ago that’s where that’s all started again and I say again because we go through 5 year Cycles where we speak about AI we’ve been there before I remember five or more years ago going to Legal conferences where they were speaking about AI being the next big thing is that Watson Etc yeah and look what happened to Watson it didn’t really you know come to anything but everybody thought it was going to and it was the big chat at legal Tech conferences that AI was coming lawyers needed to get ready for it and everything else and here we are another 5 years later and suddenly Jenny nothing really happened much in in the five years before where we were being told amazing things were going to happen then generative AI comes along with a big fan fair and is the best thing since sliced braid and everybody’s jumping on the bandwagon and thinking that you know this is going to revolutionise the practice of Law and revolutionise lots of other Industries but you know generative AI is really something that takes a lot of words and joins them together and sometimes gets it right and sometimes doesn’t it doesn’t really know or understand exactly what it’s doing it’s not thinking it’s not actually intelligent it’s just a system that’s been developed that allows from lots and lots of data the ability to string words together and people think lawyers do words so this is clearly going to replace lawyers because this is a machine that does words but it really is just a parrot that spits out words without really thinking or understanding what those words are and in a lot of cases it is what has become known as hallucinating it hallucinates and it just spits out garbage or gibberish as when American judge called it and so there’s a danger there and people who are Advocates of the hype are quick and Keen to say oh it’ll just get better know this is that it is very worst but in a year or two’s time it’ll be amazing well will it we need to wait and see it’s already been around for two years it’s still hallucinating no one’s been able to get rid of its ability to hallucinate and there’s lots of people think that that’s an impossibility because that’s just an inbuilt feature Microsoft came up with a term what was it now usefully something usefully wrong or usefully as though it was it was useful to be making errors you know how’s that useful yeah and lawyers operate in a world of precision and a world where you need to get things right you can’t just be making mistakes and you can’t just be allowing a computer system to be used that you have to spend a lot of time double-checking and triple checking to make sure it’s correct so I suppose I am a bit sceptical about it I’m not saying it doesn’t have its uses I’m not saying that in Limited extents at the moment it’s not something that could be used purposefully to maybe get answers or information or do things a little bit quicker one of the uses people speak about is summarising where you know you’re taking an existing long document and you’re asking it to summarise and it’ll do that very quickly and effectively and for some people that might be a very useful task to do and it’s less likely when it’s dealing with that set of information to hallucinate in the process because it’s not looking at a huge data set but even to that extent how often are solicitors actually summarising things and if you are summarising say for example a court case because you need to summarise that court case for a specific client for a specific point of law does chat GPT know what the specific detail is okay you can prompt it but is it going to pull out of that case the actual important point that you need for the case you’re dealing with and I mean I’ve seen myself dealing with court cases that sometimes all you need for a case is one sentence chat GPT is not going to know what that one sentence is and it might well in a summary miss it and really I think it’s very difficult to get beyond the fact that a lawyer with all the training that the lawyer has and all the knowledge of the case they are working on and the Salient points in a in a previous case that might be relevant to that knows how to find that when reading a case and if you rely on a machine summarising that case for you may well miss the important point that you should have found if you had sitting down and read the whole case yeah I mean I think that’s a 100% true I mean the chat GPT is not going to understand the context of your relationship the context of your relationship with the opposing parties or with the opposing party solicitors the point that’s of utmost relevance to this individual situation and for your client is never going to know that and I think part of the thing for you as far as I understand it is that actually you’re saying let’s not get distracted by that now this is an opportunity to shine a light on technology that has been available for years that in fact the vast majority of firms aren’t deploying exactly and I mean document automation systems have been around for a good 30 years have been probably you know very good and able to be used very well over the past 15 or 20 years and improving all the time and it may well be that providers of those document automation systems start introducing elements of chat GPT that can augment and enhance them yeah but why suddenly go away and get distracted by playing with say chat GPT at the moment than implementing technology that you’ve probably actually got in your practice that you’ve not even started Implement and you know there’s some chat about chat about chat GPT you know being able to draft things from scratch know why on Earth would you do that why would you ask a machine draft me a contract you know to do something from scratch and just put in a prompt and hit it find this contract Now is it going to find a contract that is suitable under Scottish law where’s it finding this contract from how long are you going to have to spend going over that and making sure it’s correct maybe things being missed out that are relevant each time you ask chat GPT to produce something it’ll produce something different it’s not going to produce the same thing every time so you know why would you do that and people seem to be and I actually had this debate on LinkedIn just this past week they seem to have a lack of understanding that lawyers have operated for centuries using templates and styles although I discovered this past week that in England they don’t use the word Styles or templates it’s precedents so you’re in Scotland we usually refer to templates or Styles but in England president is the is the common usage but sister have always used that you even before the days of computers there would be books that would have styles in them that people would use I remember in my early days working in a law office before I even started a trainee ship where there were printed documents that you could fill in blanks using a typewriter you know there were templates there that were used to speed up and improve and enhance  and make efficiencies without starting from scratch and starting from a blank page but there seems to be we seem to have gone to this school of thought that you know you just need to start from a blank page and let chat cheap PT do it for you I mean it’s a nonsense I suppose in an elements there’s a public perception around it and that although you’re aware of styles and precedence there’s a perception sometimes amongst the public that they sort of have an idea or an inkling that that’s being used by lawyers however they don’t ever seem to feel the benefit of that efficiency or in their pockets M and I and I imagine that’s why to a certain extent there’s also been a bit of an upwell around the use of gen or Genai replacing lawyers is because I say well they deserve that because they’ve not passed on well I think probably we’ve seen saying convening where convening fees are very competitive and over the years you know came down a lot  a lot of sister had to look at how to make the convening process more efficient yeah in order to enable them to provide the service they do at the level of fees that they are now charging so I think there’s an element that actually the customer has seen a benefit in solicitors becoming more efficient through the use of Technology they may not appreciate that but I think that has happened and I think there’re certainly solicitors who have seen a need to automate more because of price competitiveness okay and well that’s very interesting Brian thanks for that I you know I generally ask guests for their definition of law firm success have you got one it’s been said that it takes 25 years to become an overnight success I’ve now been at this for 25 years  it’s a hard and long struggle it’s not easy yeah but I’d like to think that now we’re getting to a point over those 25 years that we are becoming an overnight success but you know what do you see us being the success I suppose that’s the question you’re really asking for me it is seeing me move from a situation where I was in a traditional Law Firm that were not willing to help me grow my business within their business to a situation where I am now hopefully  I’ve created a law firm that allows solicitors to join us where I can help support them to grow their business within our business and by taking away from them a lot of the hassles and administrative and red tape that they would have to deal with so they can concentrate on the law and hopefully be less stressed as a result of that in operating their own little businesses within inkster and as a result of that that they will be happier lawyers because of the infrastructure that we’ve put in place that allows them to work in a better way and ultimately that that will  be seen by their clients in the service that each of those solicitors can provide all right well thank you very much thanks for that Brian thank you so thanks very much for listening to today’s episode I hope you enjoyed it I hope you’re enjoying our content we’ll be delighted to hear any feedback that you have you can find out more about the you your Law Firm success podcast at MLT digital.co.uk/podcast Please Subscribe please share with your friends please share with anyone who you know that you think would be interested