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Martin Stockdale, Partner, Kennedys Law

Describe your career to date

 

Whenever a lawyer develops a career around data and artificial intelligence (AI) then it will never be considered as a standard legal career. I am grateful to have worked throughout my career with excellent lawyers, investigators, and technologists that have allowed me to explore my curiosity in a way that has resulted in the opportunity to cross business disciplines and join unfamiliar dots; whether in the way client problems are solved, legal services delivered, or how legal businesses operate. Most recently I have had the opportunity to work with great teams that have solved business data problems from reporting and analytics, strategy, and transformation and privacy and risk. I am now leading on the development of a global AI programme to explore and exploit the opportunities – while recognising and mitigating the challenges – posed by further development of the existing, and emergence of those new technologies that look set to drive the next wave of industrial and economic activity. As I have done before, I will approach this by enabling those that can to create business value while translating between the worlds and languages of data, legal, operations, and clients. 

How are you developing the data literacy of your organisation, including the skills of your data teams and of your business stakeholders?

 

Our global data transformation is built around nine Data Principles that are user centric and designed deliberately to enable everyone across the firm to level up their data literacy, whether consciously or not. We bake in literacy competence by ensuring our solutions are built around data; that data services and tools address user needs; that we create responsibility for data across the business; that capture processes focus on what is required for the user to get the job done; and then around that we look to build skills and knowledge. Literacy is two-sided commitment. 

How are you preparing your organisation for AI adoption and change management?     

 

We recognise that AI is a business systems and transformational challenge that needs to understand impacts of existing and developing AI technologies on society, our industry sector, our clients, and how this all comes together to change everything from how we do things now, to the services we will need to provide in the future and our own commercial and business models. To do this we are taking a holistic approach by developing a global programme with a number of work streams that will enable us to discover, explore, protect, educate, and engage. Our approach is deliberately not technology-led, but at the same time will see us get hands on AI solutions we both buy and build. We recognise and understand the importance of knowing all that we can about, and responding to the totality of, the AI challenge, and the opportunities that will be presented. 

Martin Stockdale
has been included in:
  • 100 Brands 2021 (EMEA)
  • 100 Brands 2022 (EMEA)
  • 100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)

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