Ahead of Legal Innovators UK in London on November 4 and 5, the events team spoke to Philip Cooney, Director of Innovation at White & Case, about his work with legal AI. He and many other experts will be on stage across the landmark legal innovation event. Express ticket registration is now open, see below.
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Philip focuses on using AI and emerging technologies to transform transactional legal practice, from secure Generative AI platforms to transaction management.
Having started his career at Linklaters, he has seen first-hand how technology has moved from back-office support to a core part of legal services delivery.
Ahead of Legal Innovators UK 2026, where he joins ‘Beyond the Portal: Building Permanent Client Alliances’, we spoke with Philip about AI adoption, workflow redesign, and what it takes to build lasting digital partnerships between firms and clients.
Enjoy the interview!
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What initially attracted you to legal technology, and how has your perspective on the relationship between law and technology changed throughout your career?
Philip Cooney: My first full-time role was as an AI paralegal at Linklaters, and from there I moved between legal advisory and technology roles. Although I qualified as a lawyer, what kept me in legal technology was seeing, from the inside, how much of a lawyer’s time was absorbed by mechanical, repeatable work rather than genuine judgement calls. Early in my career, technology was largely viewed as back-office support: useful, but peripheral to ‘real’ legal work. That has changed fundamentally. Today, at White & Case, technology and AI represent a paradigm shift for the legal profession, and the firm’s strategy treats innovation as core to how legal services are delivered, not an add-on. My own perspective has shifted accordingly: from seeing technology as a tool that sits alongside legal practice to seeing it as something that is genuinely reshaping how legal judgement is applied and where it adds the most value.
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To pick up your tickets, please follow the link below. Complimentary passes are for those working inside law firms and within corporate legal teams.
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How has the increasing use of AI, automation and data analytics changed the way you approach your day-to-day work?
Philip Cooney: The biggest change is in scope and depth, not just speed. Rather than simply doing the same work more quickly, AI now allows teams to tackle work of a scale and complexity that would previously have been impractical, for example extending due diligence coverage across a far larger universe of documents and surfacing risks that manual review alone would not have reached within traditional budget and time constraints. In my own role, that means spending more time thinking about workflow design, verification, and where human judgement genuinely adds value, and less time on the mechanics of assembling first drafts or triaging large document sets by hand.
In your view, what are the biggest obstacles preventing law firms from successfully adopting new legal technologies?
Philip Cooney: Technology adoption in law firms rarely fails because the technology doesn’t work; it fails because of culture, trust, and workflow friction. Successful AI adoption requires more than technology; it demands deliberate investment in culture and people. The other major obstacle is verification. Until AI achieves complete accuracy and is recognised as such by clients, regulators and the market, firms are required by law, regulation and client terms to ensure all AI-generated contributions to work product are verified by a human with sufficient expertise, and this verification requirement places a variable hard ceiling on AI efficiencies. Firms that treat this as a one-off tooling decision, rather than an ongoing exercise in redesigning workflows and building trust, tend to see adoption stall.
From your perspective, what difficulties can arise when introducing new technology into established legal workflows, particularly where professionals have relied on traditional methods for many years?
Philip Cooney: The main difficulty is that lawyers have, understandably, built their professional judgement and risk tolerance around traditional, manual methods over many years, so new tools can feel like they introduce risk rather than remove it. That’s why firms need structured, deliberate change management rather than simply making a tool available. Driving adoption effectively requires top-down leadership to set strategic direction, bottom-up capability building to embed skills at the practitioner level, and horizontal enablement to accelerate change across the organisation, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of innovation. Without that structure, you get patchy, inconsistent adoption and lawyers reverting to what they know under time pressure.
What do you hope the audience will take away from your session at Legal Innovators UK 2026?
Philip Cooney: I’d like the audience to leave with a practical, grounded sense of what it actually takes to move client relationships beyond a shared portal into a genuine, sustained digital partnership, the workflow redesign, the governance, and the trust-building that sit underneath the technology, not just the tools themselves. If people leave thinking about the operational and cultural groundwork required, rather than just the platform choice, I’ll consider it a success.
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At Legal Innovators UK, Philip will join ‘Beyond the Portal: Building Permanent Client Alliances’ to explore how firms can build more sustained, technology-enabled relationships with clients.
Join us at Legal Innovators UK on 4–5 November 2026 at The Minster Building, London
To pick up your tickets, please follow the link below. Complimentary passes are for those working inside law firms and within corporate legal teams.
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Credits: Editor: Emma Nguyen, Marketing Executive at Cosmonauts, Graphics: Charles Kabunga, Design Lead at Cosmonauts
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