When Andrew King left New Zealand at 21 to play cricket in the UK, the career plan didn’t include becoming a strong voice in legal innovation.
More than 20 years later, however, that’s exactly where he’s landed with the creation of LawFest – the annual conference that has helped guide New Zealand’s legal profession from the days of paper files through e-discovery, digital transformation and now rise of artificial intelligence.
King isn’t a lawyer, and he thinks that’s part of the reason his ideas have resonated.
He entered the legal world through litigation support roles at Pinsent Masons and Mayer Brown in London between 1998 and 2008 – a time when cases were still dominated by mountains of paper and large teams of junior staff.
“You’d have young Kiwis, Aussies and South Africans packed into windowless rooms, reviewing boxes of documents page by page,” he recalls. “It was so inefficient. I started taking a real interest in the tech space to see what could help the process out.”
That search for efficiency turned into a career. After returning home, King helped build Bell Gully’s first litigation support function before moving into consulting and then on to working with the High Court Rules Committee on the development of New Zealand’s 2012 e-discovery rules.
While visiting law firms across the country, one theme stood out: lawyers knew technology was coming into the picture, but many didn’t yet see why they needed to change.
So, in 2013, he decided to do something about it.
LawFest started out as a small gathering of fewer than 70 people, aiming to demonstrate how technology could help lawyers work smarter.
From small beginnings to a national platform
In the early days, the audience was largely early adopters – lawyers who already liked digital tools and wanted to know what was next.
Covid-19 broadened the audience. “It took being stuck at home to realise how essential technology was,” King says. “If you couldn’t get into the office to grab a paper file, how were you supposed to work?”
The Christchurch earthquakes had also driven this point home as lawyers climbed into damaged buildings to retrieve client files.
“Those real-life events changed people’s mindset, with technology moving away from being a nice-to-have and becomes a must-have,” King says.
While LawFest offered virtual events during Covid lockdowns, the conference found its real momentum once people could meet again in person and the networking and practical case studies became the real gold. By 2024, attendance had grown to more than 400.
The power of being real
Authenticity is one thing King insists on in the conference. Speakers are encouraged to share practical stories and talk about what went wrong, as well as what worked well in their tech journeys.
“It is how we can learn from these lessons and adapt. I think from an audience perspective, you get a lot out of it when you realise not everything works out perfectly and it’s normal for there to be road bumps along the way. So how did you convince the business to make the investment? How did you get beyond seeing technology as a line item? How did you involve clients in the process and work with them?”
Authenticity helps make innovation feel achievable, rather than overwhelming, King says. Instead of pressure for firms to reinvent themselves overnight, LawFest promotes small, practical improvements that add up over time.
The AI era
As artificial intelligence moves into the mainstream, it will be a major theme of this year’s conference.
While it’s a big, global trend for many industries, King sees AI as part of the same long journey, just on a much bigger scale.
“With everything we do, we’ve always had to adapt and evolve. I look at the things I did five years ago, and I do them differently now. We always have to evolve.
“Despite the grand headlines about AI, it’s still people first, then process, then technology. AI is just an enabler. It is all about how technology can be leveraged to empower your people and enable them to provide greater value to your clients.”
Firms are now asking what skills they’ll need, which tasks might change, and how to train staff – junior lawyers in particular, King says.
And while many graduates are already comfortable with digital tools, they still need to learn how to use them in a business context.
“It’s garbage in, garbage out. You need to know how to prompt AI and learn how to get the best from it. AI is not a magic button, as to leverage successfully it takes work,” King says.
“Sometimes firms don’t change until their clients demand it,” King says. “Those expectations are shifting now. The firms that get ahead of that curve will be the ones that thrive.”
New format for 2026
To reflect changes across the industry, including recent public sector cutbacks, LawFest has moved to a two-day format this year.
Day one will feature a free expo, designed to give more people the chance to explore new tools, meet vendors and see what’s possible.
“For some firms, budgets mean only one person can attend the conference,” King says. “Opening up the expo, free, means more of their team can come along, even if it’s just for a couple of hours, to see all of the technology in one place.”
Day two will remain the main event, with a strong focus on AI and the future of legal work and an emphasis on people and processes, not technology alone.
“I hope to expose more people to the opportunities of what’s possible in this space,” King says.
0 Comments