Data seems to be the word on everyone’s lips right now. Phrases like data breaches, data harvesting, and data regulations clog our news feeds until our brains start turning it all into white noise.

The market debate continues to rage regarding proposed reforms to professional indemnity insurance for solicitors in England and Wales.

Many companies struggle with the right places to include artificial intelligence and machine learning. Ensuring you have a deep grasp on your industry and its underlying pain points can make a real difference.

Four years ago, the SRA Handbook was 648 pages long. It contained all sorts of processes, restrictions and obligations that had grown up over many years. Some of these processes cost those we regulate time and money to comply with and pay for. Others cost us, and therefore the profession, to process. Many added little in making sure that the priorities of regulation – the rule of law and public protection – were supported. At the same time the rulebook restricted how solicitors could practise. There had been small relaxations from a prescriptive model based on traditional lawyer partnerships. But fundamentally practising law was unchanged – we could even call it artisanal and craft-based.

Speed in adapting to change and in improving your main products/services is of the utmost importance. As Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg of Google note in their book How Google Works: “Product development has become a faster, more flexible process, where radically better products don’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but on the shoulders of lots of iterations. The basis for success then, and for continual product excellence, is speed.”