Seeing is believing

There is a certain comfort in experience. After decades in legal practice, you develop instincts and habits that have served you, and your clients, well. You know how to read a room, draft a clause that will hold up under scrutiny, and counsel a client through a crisis at midnight. These things are not easily replaced.

But comfort can also be a trap.

I am a senior lawyer and have been practising for longer than some of my colleagues have been alive. At the start of my career as a corporate lawyer, my exposure to technology was limited to waiting by the fax machine for the next turn of an agreement, then ferrying my mark-ups back and forth to the word processing team.

Over the past couple of years, I have been doing something that does not always come naturally at my stage of a career: I have been actively, deliberately,