"Garbage in, garbage out" still applies: : Legal Tech Talk 2026 Panel discusses Tech Adoption and AI use in legal practice

At Legal Tech Talk 2026, a panel discussion titled "Creating Strategic Advantage as AI Becomes Mainstream" explored how organizations approach artificial intelligence and innovation in legal practice. Moderated by Dan Hauck, Chief Product Officer at NetDocuments, the session featured Christel Aguila, Partner and Director of IT at Winckworth Sherwood. The discussion focused on practical experiences of technology adoption and the use of AI in legal practice. Aguila observed that innovation is shifting from building new technologies towards building new capabilities and delivering them faster and more intelligently than competitors. She emphasized that innovation is always about the problem, not the technology itself, and that many innovative solutions emerge from practical problems or chaotic workflows. Aguila illustrated this point with a project where her firm developed a self-service SharePoint solution to organize and tag twenty years of information stored across different systems, which received the highest score in a competitive tender because of the value delivered to the client. Hauck noted that although AI was not part of the immediate solution, future use of AI depends upon being able to locate the right information and understand the relevant documents in context. Aguila reiterated the IT principle of "garbage in, garbage out," observing that organizations cannot simply place AI over disorganized documents and expect it to produce the right answer, as AI remains probabilistic. The discussion concluded with an interactive question-and-answer session.

(Source：Scconline)