In her speech at the opening of the 2019 Legal Year in Hong Kong last week, which I was honoured to attend, the President of the Hong Kong Law Society, Melissa Pang, urged solicitors to embrace the technological innovation and change that is transforming the legal profession.

The Hong Kong Law Society President suggested that “practitioners should be capably supervising the use of the new technologies, not competing with them”.

Here in NSW, our members are hungry for information about innovation and technology and we are powering ahead with initiatives to help solicitors to stay ahead of the game in understanding how it will affect the way they practise today and into the future.

This year, we will continue our successful bi-monthly Future of Law and Innovation in the Profession (FLIP) inquiry series exploring the range of legal technology “buzzwords” that abound (and potentially confound) in the profession.

We begin on 27 February with an engaging and informative look at regulatory technology, known as “RegTech”.

Topics to be explored by the RegTech panel include:

• Explaining RegTech and what it means for lawyers
• Providing examples of its use, including in compliance with regulatory requirements such as anti-money laundering, fraud detection and compliance reporting
• An overview of the RegTech eco-system, including its industry and regulatory participants
• The potential RegTech solutions to respond to the Banking Royal Commission's recommendations
• Procurement and outsourcing process and its legal issues, and
• Regulatory challenges

For those who cannot attend we will convert the panel discussion into a podcast and make it available on our website for members to access at their convenience.

I am pleased to say we have many more FLIP initiatives planned for 2019 and beyond, including an upcoming series of CPD sessions on cybersafety and a Regional FLIP series in four key locations, which will provide tailored and practical support for our regional members on the technological and innovative disruption facing the profession.

Elizabeth Espinosa, Law Society of NSW President

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