McCann FitzGerald: Profession at ‘crossroads of legal innovation’

McCann FitzGerald’s managing partner has said the Irish legal profession is at a “crossroads of legal innovation”, which it can either embrace or face irrelevance.

Barry Devereux spoke to the Sunday Independent in the third year of his four-year tenure as managing partner of the Dublin firm.

His firm recently established a partnership with Neota Logic, a US-based artificial intelligence software company.

In the wide-ranging interview, Mr Devereux said: “We used to compete with other Dublin law firms. We still do. But now our competitors are different and they come from the United States - it might be legal process outsourcing firms like Axiom, and Riverview Law and they’re providing alternate legal services to clients with different models.”

He added: “With the global economic crisis in 2008, that’s accelerated the rate of progress that law firms have had to make because all our clients have faced existential threats to their business and the ‘more for less’ philosophy is now with us. The clients expect more from their suppliers so they can give more to their customers. It’s no different for us, we have to find ways of delivering more for less.”

Mr Devereux identified fintech as “a big area” for the firm’s future.

He explained: “There’s 100,000 people working in technology in Ireland and 40,000 in the financial services industry.

“When you combine them that’s a lot of smart people doing things that are broadly aligned with each other.

“The other area of growth is around cybersecurity and privacy. The technology and innovation team here is very engaged in dealing with cyber risk and I suppose the explosion in data creation by the tech companies has been a boon for our team here.”

Mr Devereux said the firm had also benefited from hiring people from non-legal backgrounds, including “people whose degrees are in music, technology, engineering and psychology”.

He said: “We’re mixing up the backgrounds because all the studies show and our own experience shows that the more diverse the input, the better the product you have.”