On Wednesday 29th April, Nexian hosted the fourth session of the Legal Modern Workplace webinar series. Matt Newton was joined by Jane McCance, Transformation Coordinator at Thorntons Law, and Anna Rasmussen, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Thirdfort, to look outwards from the internal tech stack and ask a simple but uncomfortable question: where does the client actually fit in your technology strategy?
Here are the key takeaways:
- The client journey is not a separate conversation from the tech strategy. The two have to be designed together, otherwise firms end up building services for users that do not have those needs.
- Assumptions are the single biggest risk. Demographic assumptions about who wants digital services, assumptions about what clients find easy or stressful, and assumptions that current processes are fit for purpose all lead firms in the wrong direction.
- Service design offers a practical methodology for capturing both the client voice and the internal voice. Thorntons Law has built a three-pronged programme around training, department-level sprints, and deeper project work.
- A culture that is comfortable with failing fast is essential. Innovation requires the time, space, and psychological safety to test ideas with real users before embedding huge amounts of effort behind them.
- Technology is only one part of the client experience. Brand, language, marketing, and the option of human contact all sit alongside the digital interface, and they have to move together.
- For firms wanting to start, the advice was consistent: observe how your people actually work, listen to where the friction is, and bring the client voice in wherever you can, through internal clients, focus groups, or honest reviews.
On Wednesday 29th April, we hosted the fourth session of our Legal Modern Workplace webinar series. The previous sessions in the series have focused largely on the internal tech stack: the tools, infrastructure, and platforms law firms need to modernise their operations. This time, the conversation turned outwards, towards the people firms exist to serve.
Matt Newton was joined by two guests with very different vantage points on the same problem. Jane McCance is Transformation Coordinator at Thorntons Law, a circa 600-employee firm operating across multiple sites in Scotland. Jane's background is not legal; her training is in design, with an MSc in Design for Business and over fifteen years in the creative industries. She joined Thorntons specifically to apply design thinking and human-centred innovation to the firm. Anna Rasmussen is Senior Product Marketing Manager at Thirdfort, the digital onboarding provider used by law firms across the UK. Anna sits at the intersection of what the product does and how the client feels about it.
Between them, they covered why client experience belongs in every tech conversation, where firms tend to go wrong, and what a more thoughtful approach actually looks like in practice.
Why the client journey has to be part of the tech conversation
The session opened with a question that sounds obvious but is rarely answered well: why does the client journey have to sit inside the tech strategy at all?
Jane's answer was direct. It is easy for firms to get pulled into operational thinking, focusing on internal efficiencies and forgetting that the client experience is the differentiator.
"The customer journey, the customer experience, and how they interact with a law firm is our differentiator. It's something that is really going to be the thing that someone talks about, and we sometimes overlook that."
— Jane McCance, Transformation Coordinator, Thorntons Law
Anna picked up the same thread from the vendor side. Thirdfort's view is that any technology a client touches is, in effect, an extension of the firm itself. Her framing was that if you would not hire an onboarding manager who spoke to your clients in a confusing or inefficient way, you should not employ a technology that does the same.
That representation matters, because for many clients, an onboarding journey or a property transaction is the biggest financial event of their lives. Adding stress through poorly chosen technology does not just create a bad experience in that moment; it sets the tone for every interaction that follows.
Assumptions are the biggest risk
If there was one word that ran through the whole conversation, it was assumption. Specifically, the assumptions law firms make about their clients without ever stopping to test them.
Anna shared a finding that pushes back hard against the most common assumption of all. At Thirdfort, completion rates among older users are actually higher than among younger ones. The instinct that millennials and Gen Z are the natural digital adopters, while older clients will struggle, is simply not borne out by the data.
"It's okay for a law firm to seek reassurance from the vendor or provider… If you have assumptions you're making about a demographic, really understand why, and challenge that assumption within yourself."
— Anna Rasmussen, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Thirdfort
Jane added that this same instinct applies internally. Firms make assumptions about how their teams work, what their processes do, and whether their current ways of operating are still fit for purpose. The role of someone coming in from outside the legal sector, she said, is partly to ask the questions that nobody inside the firm thinks to ask anymore, because the patterns have become invisible.
A practical methodology: service design at Thorntons
Asking the questions is one thing. Doing something with the answers is another. Jane talked the audience through the three-pronged approach Thorntons has taken to embed client-centred thinking into its transformation work.
The first prong is training. Rather than the standard "watch a video, learn the tool, get on with it" approach, Thorntons has invested in context-building. Before introducing a new technology, the firm explores what it means for clients, for colleagues, and for the wider market. The point is to give people the meaning behind the change, not just the mechanics, because meaning is what brings people along.
The second prong is departmental sprints. Jane runs short, focused sessions that bring whole teams together to surface what she calls the "grump work": the daily tasks that people open their laptop in the morning and dread. By starting with the people doing the work, rather than with a strategic objective handed down from above, the firm has built AI agents that solve real problems in their estate agency department, among others.
The third prong is the messier, project-based work where the answer is not always technological. Sometimes the issue is governance. Sometimes it is documentation. Sometimes a process needs to be fundamentally redesigned before any tool can help.
"It's possibly a governance challenge, it's possibly a documentation standardisation issue. It's maybe not the technology itself, although that was part of that journey."
— Jane McCance
Crucially, capturing the client voice runs through all three. Jane described using internal clients as a starting point, colleagues who have been through the firm's services as customers, as a safe space to test ideas. From there, the firm moves to focus groups, reviews, and direct client feedback to make sure what gets built reflects what is actually wanted.
Building a culture that is comfortable with failure
One of the more uncomfortable points in the session was the discussion of failure. Innovation, both speakers agreed, requires a willingness to try things that do not work.
"It's about a culture of failure, it's about a mindset of failure, and that's really where innovation sits… The reality of that is actually a willingness to try something that's a bit out of the comfort zone, the ability to say, 'oh, that didn't actually work, and here's what we've learned from that.'"
— Jane McCance
That mindset becomes harder, not easier, in fast-paced environments like legal. But Jane's point was that as AI accelerates the pace of technology change, firms will have to get better at failing and learning in much shorter cycles. The alternative, deploying a half-tested process at scale because nobody had the appetite to challenge it, is far more damaging.
This is also where the client voice provides a safety net. Stress-testing an idea with real users early, before huge amounts of effort have been embedded, is the practical version of failing fast. Anna echoed the point from a vendor perspective: rather than trying to fix the entire client journey in one project, identify the points of greatest stress and tackle them in segments.
It is not just the technology
A recurring theme throughout the conversation was that the tech itself is only one piece of the puzzle. Brand, language, marketing, training, and the option of human contact all sit alongside the digital interface, and they need to move together.
Matt brought this back to a piece of work Thorntons has done around digital wills. The technology is part of the offer, but Jane's team has been deliberate about giving clients an off-ramp back to a human at the points where that matters most. The assumption that everyone wants the fastest, most digital path is itself an assumption worth questioning.
Anna made the same point from a different angle. As Thirdfort moves into more conversational, AI-augmented client journeys, the question they push their own product team on is: what happens at the edges? What happens when the technology cannot handle something? Vendors should be able to answer that question clearly, and law firms should be asking it.
The same logic applies to brand. High Street law firms tend to look quite similar to each other, and their people are typically the differentiator. As more client interactions move through digital interfaces, there is a real risk of further flattening the differences between firms unless the technology is wrapped in a clear sense of who the firm is and how it wants to serve its clients.
Where to start
The session closed with a practical question for any law firm leader watching: where do you start?
Jane's answer was to resist the temptation to jump straight to solutions. Sit with your teams, observe the day-to-day, and find out where the real friction is before you decide what to fix. When you do start mapping processes, bring the client voice in wherever you can, whether that is through internal clients, focus groups, or genuine reviews.
Anna's advice was to take the same approach when evaluating vendors. Experience the technology as a client would. Go through the journey yourself. Look at independent reviews. Ask people who have been through it. The technology your clients touch is, ultimately, a representation of you, and that is too important a decision to make from the inside out.
The thread running through every answer was the same: do not start with the technology. Start with the client and the people who serve them, and let the technology follow.
This was the fourth of seven sessions in the Legal Modern Workplace series. The next session turns to AI specifically, looking at where the major Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic Claude tools fit within a law firm strategy, and where more specialist legal AI tools earn their place.
Download the white paper or get in touch with the team if you would like to talk through how your firm is thinking about its clients within its technology strategy.
Download the
Whitepaper
nexian.co.uk/legal-modern-workplace-whitepaper
Or get in touch with the team if you would like to talk through where your firm is on its technology journey.
