Mid-tier accounting and law firms (with revenues between £5m and £250m) can improve productivity and enhance their services to clients and society if they use digital technology - including artificial intelligence - more effectively. But they are often reluctant to adopt technology. This is partly because they are uncertain about which technology to use, how to use it, and whether it will be of benefit. The partnership structures of accountancy and law firms, the traditional roles and identities of lawyers and accountants, and external factors such as education, training, regulation and career structures can also present obstacles to technology adoption. This project will provide structured methods and supporting resources to help selected accountancy and law firms accelerate their technology adoption. In doing this, the project team will also learn in more depth about how the various forms of support contribute to helping firms, and how the various obstacles can impede progress. This understanding will be used to develop templates, tools and support to help other firms in future. It will also be used to change the context in which adoption is undertaken, by bringing to the surface and reducing the obstacles presented by rules, regulations, assumptions and patterns of working that result from firms' interactions with other organisations such as professional bodies, regulators, government departments, clients and technology vendors. Overall, the project will create a market where technology adoption is less risky, complicated and potentially threatening, and therefore easier to do with confidence. The project will cater for firms at different stages of experience with technology adoption, from relative beginners to those who already use some technology but would like to extend its use. Three types of acceleration will be provided, depending on the starting-point of the firms. For beginners, basic training and advice will be provided to help them use software such as Microsoft 365 that they already have. The aim here will be to get the firms started by conducting a short project to implement the technology for one pilot application in the firm. For those who are a little more prepared, resources, technical advice and support will be provided, and a cohort of about eight to ten firms formed, who will help and encourage each other in their adoption projects. Mentoring will be provided as firms conduct their projects, and work towards a concluding event where they demonstrate what they have achieved within their firms, to the other firms, and to the wider project community. Two to four more advanced firms will get the technical or managerial help needed to further advance their technology adoption journey, and to build ways to demonstrate the value of innovation adoption more clearly. For all firms involved in the project, an innovation adoption acceleration fund will help de-risk investments in new digital technologies - this being crucial to secure participation in the project and create opportunities to learn about will create a sustainable market for innovation adoption in the future. The project team will draw together insights about which of the various forms of acceleration help are successful, for firms at different stages, and what can be done to remove obstacles in the wider social and business environment. By exhibiting outcomes widely, and consulting through workshops and roundtable meetings, the team will develop tools and roadmaps, and recommend policy changes that make adoption easier and less risky for firms, from beginners to more experienced adopters. This process of learning about how to make acceleration happen in these sectors will also lead to research findings and better theories about how innovation adoption can be accelerated more generally. It will also reveal how professions in general, and accountancy and law in particular, adapt to and sometimes resist the changes needed for digital adoption.

The proposed research will explore the potential and limitations of using artificial intelligence (AI) in support of legal services. AI's capabilities have made enormous recent leaps; many expect it to transform how the economy operates. In particular, activities relying on human knowledge to create value, insulated until now from mechanisation, are facing dramatic change. Amongst these are professional services, such as law. Like other professions, legal services contribute to the economy both through revenues of service providers and through benefits provided to clients. For large business clients, who can choose which legal regime will govern their affairs, UK legal services are an export good. For small businesses and citizens, working within the domestic legal system, UK legal services affect costs directly. Yet unlike other professions, the legal system has a dual role in society. Beyond the law's role in governing economic order, the legal system is more fundamentally a structure for social order. It sets out rules agreed on by society, and also the limits of politicians' ability to enact these rules. Consequently, the stakes for AI's implementation in UK legal services are high. If mishandled, it could threaten both economic success and governance more generally. Yet if executed effectively, it is an opportunity to improve legal services not only for export but also for citizens and domestic small businesses. Our research seeks to identify how constraints on the implementation of AI in legal services can be relaxed to unlock its potential for good. One major challenge is the need for 'complementary' adjustments. Adopting a disruptive new technology like AI requires changes in skills, training, and working practices, without which the productivity gains will be muted. We will investigate training and educational needs for lawyers' engagement with technology and programmers' engagement with law. With private sector partners, we will develop education and training packages that respond to these needs for delivery by both universities and private-sector firms. We will investigate emerging business models deploying AI in law, and identify best practice in governance and strategy. Finally, we will compare skills training and technology transfer in the UK with countries such as the US, Hong Kong and Singapore, and ask what UK policymakers can learn from these competitors. To the extent that these issues are also faced by other high-value professional services, these parts of our results will also have relevance for them. However, the dual role of the legal system poses unique challenges that justify a research package focusing primarily on this sector. There are constitutional limits to how far law's operation can be adjusted for economic reasons: we term this second constraint 'legitimacy'. We will map how automation in dispute resolution might trigger constitutional legal challenges, how these challenges relate to types of dispute resolution technology and types of claim, and use the resulting matrix to identify opportunities for maximum benefit from automation in dispute resolution. A third constraint is the limits of technological possibility. AI systems rely on machine learning, which reaches answers by identifying patterns in very large amounts of data. Its limitations are the size of the datasets needed, and its inability to provide an explanation for how the answer was reached. This poses particular difficulties for law, where many applications require or benefit from reasons being given. We will explore the possibility for frontier AI technologies to deliver legal reasoning. The research will involve a mix of disciplinary inputs, reflecting the multi-faceted nature of the problem: Law, Computer Science, Economics, Education, Management and Political Economy. Working closely with private-sector partners will ensure our research benefits from insights into, and testing against, real requirements.