The Outsider Inside: Nick West on Rewiring the Law Firm

🎤 This week we sit down (for our first in-person episode) with Nick West — Partner and Chief Strategy Officer at Mishcon de Reya — who has spent two decades working at the intersection of law, technology and business model innovation.

Nick’s path is one of the more unusual and instructive in the industry: competition lawyer at Linklaters, strategy consultant at McKinsey, product leader at LexisNexis, Managing Director of Axiom UK, and now the person responsible for technological transformation and R&D at Mishcon. He founded MDR Lab (one of the first legal tech startup incubators) and the MDR Group (collection of specialist consultancy businesses that sit alongside but separate from the core Mischon legal practice), built one of the industry’s first in-house data science teams, and has overseen the firm’s AI adoption journey from early experimentation through to commercial platform deployment. 

There are few people in the legal industry who’ve thought as deeply — or as practically — about how law firms actually work and how they might need to change.

The conversation is wide-ranging — we cover the full arc of Nick’s career, the evolution of innovation culture inside a law firm, how Mishcon adopted AI (and what they got wrong along the way), the productivity question everyone’s asking, what happens when clients start sending genuinely good AI-drafted documents, and the early “signals” for where the business model of law might be heading.

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Connect with Nick West Partner and Chief Strategy Officer at Mishcon de Reya

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For more conversations at the intersection of law and technology, head to⁠ https://lawwhatsnext.substack.com/⁠.