Chris Tart-Roberts
The AI that we've got access to today is the worst it's ever going to be. And it's only going to get quicker, it's only going to get more capable, it's only going to get more sophisticated. So lean into it now because the longer you leave it, the more difficult it's going to be to catch up.
Laura Uberoi
Hello and welcome to Everything Financial Services, a podcast from international law firm Addleshaw Goddard. In this series, we will be unpacking key developments, trends, and insights shaping the financial services sector. I'm Laura Uberoi, a financial services partner at Addleshaws. And on the show with me today is Christ Tart Roberts. Chris is a partner here at Addleshaws and leads our digital solutions team. He delivers a unique tech native service to clients, but I always say as well, he's very cool because he was doing this before it was trendy. Chris, it's so lovely to have you on today.
Chris Tart-Roberts
Thank you very much. That's very kind of you to say.
Laura Uberoi
Now, because I always say to the team here, and everyone's going to be fed up of hearing me say it, one of the most important things to have in life is a soundbite to have in your back pocket so that at any given time when you bump into anybody and they say “Hey, how are you? How's it going?” You don't waste an opportunity for really interesting conversation by saying “fine” or “busy” or any of the other stuff that is completely valid that you want to say, but is going to shut conversation down. So let's imagine that we haven't known each other for all of the years that we have and we bump into each other in the corridor and I say “Hey Chris, great to see you. How's it going?” We're getting in the lift. We've got many a floor to go up to in our new building. What do you say?
Christ Tart-Roberts
What do I say? What's occupying my thoughts right now? What's going on in 2026? I would talk to you about AI. I would talk to you about artificial intelligence, and I would talk to you particularly probably about AI agents and Agentic AI. So the new breed of AI that we are now seeing that moves us on from what we've seen over the last few years, which are AI chatbots to, you know, sort of help us with a bit of Q&A, some one shot prompting, towards AI that can really help with more complicated, more multi-step, more multi-stage tasks. So that is what I would enthral you with if we were in a lift together.
Laura Uberoi
And then the classic follow-up, which I'm sure you get constantly, is why do you love it so much? Tinged with a surely it is then going to take over our jobs.
Chris Tart-Roberts
Oh golly, big questions to kick us off with.
Laura Uberoi
We've got seven floors to go up in this lift, you know, so.
Chris Tart-Roberts
Why do I love it? As you alluded to at the beginning, I've been involved in the world of tech and AI now for quite a long time. Started off life as a much more traditional lawyer. So I spent the first half of my career as a finance lawyer. I was an associate, I was a senior associate, and then I was a banking partner doing a fairly traditional mix of work for quite a while. But I came across technology actually. quite early on, about the time that I qualified, and the firm that I qualified at was doing a lot of work around things like document automation and I started getting involved in that. And at least partly to begin with, I got involved in it because it made my life easier. You know, one of the things that I was often asked to do as a very junior associate, particularly on a Friday afternoon, was to produce a first draft of a loan agreement. And, you know, you just see your whole weekend disappearing before your eyes at that point, because it would take a good few days to get that first cut done and then to deliver it to the client on a Monday morning.
Laura Uberoi
I mean, what are these weekends that you speak of?
Christ Tart-Roberts
Ah these weekends, they are but a distant memory. And I saw, so the document automation then started appearing and that really helped push through that task much more quickly. So you could do that task in a few hours rather than a few days, and there was part of me that had some sort of self-interest in that and you know gravitated towards it because it gave me back my weekend. But they also saw more fundamentally how it made the service better for the client, how it made us more efficient. But how it also improved the quality of the output, the quality of the product. You could ensure that you had caught everything that you wanted to catch and bake things in and standardisation and consistency and risk management and all of those sorts of things. Actually it improved the service from the client perspective. And actually as the years have gone by and technology has become a bigger and bigger part of my job, if I think back to 10, maybe 15 years ago now when we saw the first wave of legal AI coming in with natural language processing tools and machine learning tools that started helping us with due diligence and document review tasks, that's I think what's intrigued me most is how technology fundamentally can improve what we as lawyers do for our clients. So that's probably my North Star actually in everything that I do when it comes to technology and why I do it, why I find it really interesting. I think there's something in my brain that just quite enjoys the tech side of it and it's quite sort of mathematical and quite logical and that appeals to me. But fundamentally it's the ability to do things better.
Laura Uberoi
And you can see that, I mean, in all the meetings that we frequently go to where I sort of say I have a client and inevitably my first question is, what can the tech do and the digital solutions do before I have to staff up with a human team? And I always find it amazing, Chris, that there is this incredible skill set of the in-depth banking and finance knowledge that you know most finance partners are going to have, twinned with this creativity of whatever it is that you're trying to imagine, I can build it. And it just it blows my mind that I'm yet to give you something that you can't then build and do something amazing with and I guess because that application is then so broad, where at any given point do you focus down on? Do you go in with our financial services clients and say, right, okay, here's the order. This is what you do. I'm a very keen follower of yours anyway, Chris, but I don't think that there is a tech conference that occurs without you as the lead speaker or moderator on something. This year, what's coming up in those conferences? What is coming up in terms of the most popular instructions that are coming in from clients, do you think?
Chris Tart-Roberts
So I think one of the big things that we've seen this year, and it really is actually just this last six months or so in particular, is I mean, the conversation in relation to AI is moving on really quickly the whole time. The technology is developing at such a pace that it's astonishing. But the conversation this year, particularly in financial services, feels like it's shifted and it's moving beyond our clients, you know, banks, other financial services firms, asking us about how we are using AI in the context of, say, the services that we provide to them, and it's moving towards how can we, those banks, those other firms, how can we use AI ourselves within our in-house legal teams? And we've seen a lot this year some really big banks starting to invest in and roll out big enterprise legal AI platforms, you know, some institutions are developing their own tools and they're starting to think really differently about the scope for technology, the scope for AI, the role that it plays both in an in-house and a law firm context. I mean, that's incredibly exciting for me because it opens up so many opportunities and the receptivity that has been there and has been growing over recent years. It increases that times 10, times 100. I think it's particularly interesting in a financial services context because I think it's almost that there's a perfect storm of conditions for financial services really almost to move quicker than any other sector when it comes to that interplay of use of technology by both law firms and clients together, because you look at financial services, you look at big banks say, they have really big and sophisticated legal teams. Some of the legal teams in the big banks are bigger than many law firms, they've got big legal ops teams. They've got a huge amount of work that they do themselves in-house where AI can support hugely and we're starting to see that really pick up now. Banks sit on huge amounts of data and data ultimately is the kind of the lifeblood of AI. That's what makes it really sing. And financial services as a sector, there's a keen understanding and thread through of risk and assurance and governance and things like that within those sorts of organisations, which actually is very helpful here because when you're thinking about AI and you want to deploy it safely and responsibly and do the right thing, actually culturally they're really well set up for that as well. So I think that is by far in a way the biggest thing that we're seeing this year is a broadening out of AI use and us working increasingly with clients on how they're using AI as well as how we're using it.
Laura Uberoi
I absolutely love the idea of the data singing. But I mean, in terms of what that actually looks like in terms of real-life examples. Now, I know you and I frequently speak about the joys of raising children and particularly coaching me through teenage daughters. But I know we talk quite a lot about what on earth comes up over the dinner table every evening. I guess in when you and your family are sat around the dinner table and they ask you what you've been doing. Are there good examples that you can give them of something exactly that clients are doing? Obviously anonymously, but that gives them a flavour of exactly what that looks like.
Chris Tart-Roberts
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Different people focus on different things and there would be some aspects of what I do that I think very much excite my children, and when I talk to them about what I do, the kind of the AI side of things and this idea of there being robots doing this, that and the other and, you know, robots working hand in glove with people, they have all of these images in their heads, which are wonderful, quite far away from reality. Actually I find with most, a lot of people that I talk to, clients in particular, but within the firm as well, actually talking about the outcomes and the business outcomes and the improvements to business outcomes that technology AI can deliver, actually, that's where people really pay attention. So they listen when you talk about AI and they go, that sounds wonderful. But the actual kind of the pure tech side of things, sometimes people just are a bit blinded by science. But when you actually start talking about what the technology can do and what it can do for a client's business that makes the service that we provide maybe better than the service that we could otherwise provide, then that's where ears really prick up. So an example of that, there’s a piece of work that I did just recently for a large financial services client, the challenge that they brought to us it was a legal problem, I guess. But actually it turned out that what they were coming to us with was more of a business problem than a legal problem. And they were looking at building up a portfolio of investments and certain assets and they were looking at lots of assets and thinking about whether they were the right things for them to invest in. And we were helping them with the due diligence on those opportunities. And in that sort of situation, they really needed to assess the opportunities quickly and they needed to make fast decisions. But the traditional approach, due diligence, there would have taken days, you know, every time an opportunity came in, they needed to make decisions quicker than that, and it was almost as if the legal process, if you like, was a bit of a barrier to them getting on and doing, you know, achieving their commercial outcome, which was ultimately investing, you know, doing that effectively. So what really struck me about the work that we did with them, and we created a solution for them, leveraged AI really heavily. It wasn't so much the efficiency that we were able to achieve with that technology or the way that, you know, the whizzy things that the technology did. It was what that speed of service and we managed to speed up the due diligence so that rather than delivering it in days, we could deliver it in hours. It was what that then gave the client in terms of the ability to act quickly, to be able to make investment decisions really quickly, to be able to deploy their capital more effectively than they had done in the past. And I think when you see it in those terms, that's when their ears really prick up. That's when people really listen. Because ultimately that's what matters. It's the outcome that you're delivering really rather than how you get there.
Laura Uberoi
Yeah, no need to show me the workings.
Chris Tart-Roberts
Exactly, exactly. People are interested in what goes on under the bonnet and that, particularly when we're talking about AI, is something that people want to have conversations about. But you can't talk about that in isolation. It's what does that then facilitate? What does that do? How does that improve the service? What's better because of that?
Laura Uberoi
I don't know what you have found but certainly in every conversation until very recently that I have been having with particularly financial institutions and financial services clients is well that there's not much we can actually do because I am guarded by such strict rules as to the tech I'm allowed to use, how I'm allowed to share the data inside of my firm and the various service providers and other relationships I'm allowed to enter into that there's just no point because unless it can be built on my system and I don't have to send anything external of my institution, then you know I haven't got any options. Presumably because the team is doing so well. I don't know, you spent a lot of time working with our corporate commercial team on exactly those questions. Presumably those issues now are just are non-issues and easy to fix.
Chris Tart-Roberts
They can still be issues, but they're issues that hold things up less frequently and you know the frequency is reducing kind of every day. I guess it's in the nature of some of these really large organisations that they have lots of policies and lots of layers of approvals that you have to work through and sometimes that can require a bit of work. But I think as familiarity with these kind of tools and these approaches is increasing, that is becoming easier. It is certainly becoming easier where we are seeing organisations roll out some of these tools themselves because necessarily they've been through those processes they’re more ready to be able to give them to their own teams. So it's something that still requires work, I think, across the industry, but it's becoming less of an issue than it was.
Laura Uberoi
Well, people've got to keep up, haven't they? So I guess there's not much of a choice. And so I guess then, Chris, obviously I have the joy of being able to take you with me whenever I go and want to talk to people about this. But in terms of the takeaways for everybody else, what are the couple of things that you would say to people that we should be doing that you would pass on over dinner or, you know, just a couple of quick if you're not doing this, then you're really going to be left behind.
Chris Tart-Roberts
Well I think I would say first of all, do something rather than do nothing. I think that because there's so much going on right now, because there's so much in the press, there's you know, there's so much talk about this area, people worry that they've already been left behind. When I talk to clients, clients almost always think that their peers are doing more than they are. And you know, there are certainly some organisations, I think, who are blazing a trail, but I think it's still early days. I think we're, you know, we're still really at quite an early point in our journey, if you want to call it that as a profession, as an industry. So whilst some might have started a little bit earlier than others, I would say to any client actually, if you haven't got going already, get going now. Move quickly and you can catch up. But that won't be the case forever, I think because the technology is moving so quickly. You've got this sort of exponential growth in terms of the tech and what it can do. The longer and longer you leave it, the more difficult it will be to catch up and there will come a point where it will become nigh on impossible to catch up just because the curve bent upwards so much. So I'd absolutely say get involved now. Start thinking about AI in the context of what you do. Talk to your law firms about it as well. You know, I think for many law firms we've been really active in this space for quite a long time. There are lots of ways that we can help client organisations in relation to that. In terms of the way that we do our work with those clients and the sorts of services that we can provide to our clients which are tech enabled, but also helping our clients with their own use of AI in the context of their in-house legal teams and functions and what you can apply that to and getting going and then how you can sort of build up and become more sophisticated in your use of technology and starting to think about more structured workflows and agents, as I mentioned at the at the beginning, and really kind of scaling that up and becoming more complex and more sophisticated with it. So absolutely I would say get going. I would say lean on your law firms. I would say in terms of areas to think about, particularly in financial services, look for those areas where things like speed or time sensitivity having direct commercial consequences, as we were talking about a second ago, repeatability, look for areas like that within the business, and those are places that AI, I think, can really deliver significant gains and where there's a really significant case for change and the results are most tangible. So thinking about areas like due diligence and terms analysis and compliance monitoring and obligations management and things like that, I think would be the first areas to think about.
Laura Uberoi
I mean that upwards growth is just enormous. And so I guess that then makes it even harder. I was about to say I'm not going to put you on the spot and ask you to predict the future, but that's literally exactly what I'm about to do. But more so I guess in the guise of not just with your crystal ball, but watching that curve and actually riding right at the front of it. Is there anything in particular that you can see coming that you're really excited about? Or I guess actually if you had a magic wand, something if you could change or implement or do that you would do for what's next and what's coming at us.
Chris Tart-Roberts
So I think just in terms of what the technology can do and you know the nuts and bolts of the functionality, if you like, this whole Agentic piece is really exciting. I think that is going to unlock a huge amount in terms of how we use the technology, in terms of how our clients use AI technology, how we use it together, how we work together within AI platforms. We're going to see a huge step change in terms of what we're able to do, the level of sophistication, complexity that we're going to be able to have, but it's going to unlock a huge amount. So I think, you know, if I'm looking in my crystal ball and I'm thinking what's on the horizon this year and going into next year, that is really exciting. I think more broadly and going back to what I was saying a second ago about outcomes and thinking about client outcomes and how technology can really improve those, I think as we embed AI more, as we leverage it more, I really hope that we think in those terms about what it can do for us. I think there's a lot of conversation, a lot of focus, and rightly so around, efficiency and what does it mean for things like pricing and those are absolutely things to think about. But actually fundamentally, how can AI help us deliver a better service? How can it improve the client outcome? Going back to what I was saying at the beginning, I'd like to think that there will become a bigger and bigger focus on that. Not just that the technology can do something, but it should do something because this is what it delivers. So that's what I hope it’s, you know, idealistic, but I think that's what the technology offers as well in terms of what's going to happen going forwards. There’s so many implications when you think about technology developing and how we're going to scale it across the profession, what it means for law firms, the way law firms are structured, what law firms look like. The same for in-house teams as well and I think actually there's potential. I'm genuinely excited actually for what AI means for people who work in law. I think there's a lot of worry out there, people maybe worry about what it means for jobs and job roles and things like that. And I get that. I get that absolutely. But I think there's a real opportunity for AI as well to improve the profession from the perspective of the professionals who work within it. And maybe it ties back a bit to what I was saying about my early experiences of document automation and what that meant for me. But when you think about what AI can do and how it can help you plough through some of the high-volume tasks, the process-based tasks and things like that, that then creates space, right? It creates space for lawyers to really spend more of their time on the things that are human that AI can't replicate, you know, judgment and relationships and understanding what a client really needs. That whole trusted advisor piece that if you think about why people become lawyers in the first place. It’s to do those sorts of things. So I really hope that AI brings that. There are lots of difficult questions for us to work through and think about how, you know, all of that plays out in practice. But I hope we can have that as a bit of a North Star as well, that AI can genuinely offer professionals an enriched professional experience as well as giving clients a much better outcome, a much better service.
Laura Uberoi
I love those North Stars, Chris. Good chapters for the for the memoirs. I mean absolutely crazy behaviour, isn't it? Encouraging people to, you know, take fulfilment and enjoy their work in meaningful things rather than obviously all of the photocopying that we all signed up to do. Our juniors do actually genuinely much more fulfilling things, but I can remember that stock phrase that I used to have to have as a trainee, which is whatever this task is, in photocopying, stuffing the envelopes, making the binders up or whatnot, it's like thank you for this opportunity. It's a great learning opportunity because I'll obviously read every page as we go.
Chris Tart-Roberts
Those hours spent at the fax machine at the end of a very long day trying to get something to go through and waiting for the little reports that would tell you that it had been received so that you could at last go home. Thankfully, those are now tales of ancient history.
Laura Uberoi
War stories that no one will believe. And we are not old, so we won't go down that route. But I guess I know I always come to you for life advice, let alone the actual legal stuff, but I guess in terms of career advice and something that was told to you during your career or a principle that you think has really helped keep you ahead of the curve in terms of where the market is going, but also, you know, just as a very successful partner. Is there a bit of advice that you live by that might help others, do you think?
Chris Tart-Roberts
I remember when I was newly qualified and I worked with a terrific partner. I did quite a lot of work with her during my first couple of years. But I remember just after qualification her saying to me that I must make sure that I never say no to work. Never say no to work that feels hard. Because that's how you grow, that's how you develop, pushing you outside your comfort zone. You know, that's what really moves the needle. And actually, I think over the years that's something that I have come back to a lot. I think going back to what we're talking about today and AI and how that plays out and what it means, what it means in terms of the way that we serve clients, what it means in terms of the way that our firms look, what it means for recruitment and training and you know, everything else, those are quite hard questions. So I think about that advice and I think actually, no, those are hard questions, but we have to answer them. And so those aren't the things to say no to. We've got to lean into them. So yeah, that was that was one bit of advice that I got early on in my career that sort of I think stood me in pretty good stead over the years. One of the other things actually that just comes to mind just again in relation to AI, and not to bring it back to AI again. I do have other topics of conversation, I promise. One of the things that I think about a lot and this is something said by people who are far cleverer than I am, is that the AI that we've got access to today is the worst it's ever going to be. And it's only going to get quicker, it's only going to get more capable, it's only going to get more sophisticated. So again, lean into it now because the longer you leave it, the more difficult it's going to be to catch up.
Laura Uberoi
Goodness. Yes, it sounds like every conversation I have with my daughters at the moment. They’re already far more competent than I am. Chris, as ever, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for letting me quiz you all things professional and more personal as well. Thank you very much.
Chris Tart-Roberts
You’re very welcome
Laura Uberoi
Thanks for joining us today everybody for this episode of Everything Financial Services. Please don't forget to like and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. We would also love it if you would leave us a five-star review please, as that helps others to find us. And we will see you next time. Bye-bye.
