Inside View: Stewart Crane on Withers' technology priorities and AI in practice

In the latest episode of Inside View, Caroline Hill, editor of Legal IT Insider, speaks with Stewart Crane, global IT director at Withers, about the UK top 50 law firm's IT strategy and how it is attempting to democratise innovation across the firm.  Crane, who joined Withers in 2018 after senior technology roles in insurance and financial services, oversees IT, cyber security and project delivery capabilities. Withers is an international, private client law firm and we discuss what is driving its current investment decisions and how it is moving from experimentation to execution when it comes to AI. Withers was a fairly early adopter of Microsoft Copilot and Crane says: "Predominantly we focused on getting a breadth of AI across the firm and our strategy was always that we were going to start as widely as possible to get experience and skills in-house, while at the same time delivering enough benefits to justify the cost." From there, Withers has looked on to GenAI tools aimed at specific user groups - predominantly, but not exclusively, fee-earners. Crane says, "...it really is this evolutionary process where we're continuously seeing what we've got, what the gaps are, how do we fill those gaps, measuring capabilities and moving that forward." We discuss the types of technology in use, the business use cases that have gained the most traction, the vendor landscape, and what has surprised Crane most in terms of lawyer engagement and appetite for change. Withers launched a new strategy within the past 18 months and one of the key tenets was driving client experience and productivity through better use of technology. We discuss what that means in practice and how the firm will measure success.