72 hours, 200 professionals, and the future of legal innovation: Thoughts from LawWithoutWalls

At iManage, we’re champions for the power of technology to improve the lives of knowledge workers. After all, we’ve dedicated ourselves to creating a platform that empowers legal teams and beyond to work efficiently and securely from anywhere. We also know that the true value of technology is in its ability to amplify humans rather than replace them. 

This has never been clearer to me than at the recent LawWithoutWalls (LWOW) sprint — a 72-hour legal innovation hackathon that brought together 200 GCs, in-house lawyers, law firm partners, innovation leads, legal technologists, and law students from six continents.  

Participants were divided into teams and tasked with developing innovative solutions to real-world legal industry problems. At the end of the sprint, teams presented their solutions before a panel of judges and their fellow participants. It was great to represent iManage in front of this crowd, and even better that our team won the audience vote and came second with the judges! 

More important than the result, though, was that LWOW was a rare opportunity to be part of a multidisciplinary, multi-cultural, multi-generational team and work through our shared challenges together. Here’s what I learned from those three days.   

New collaborators, new perspectives

Most of the time, law students, private practice lawyers, in-house teams, and legal technologists operate in parallel worlds. And when they do interact, it's typically across a table — client and advisor, buyer and seller, student and employer. LWOW puts them on the same side. 

Our team had law students from Sydney, Lisbon, and Paris, a behavioural science analyst from the UK, a law firm BD lead from Portugal, a lawyer from Miami, an insurance executive from Fort Lauderdale, and three of us from iManage. Try assembling that team on a Tuesday afternoon in your office!  

My takeaway? The best ideas come from people who aren’t normally supposed to be in the same room. 

Slow down to speed up

One of the most distinctive aspects of the event was its structure, which forced participants to resist jumping straight to solutions. Instead, we spent significant time understanding the problem itself. 

For a profession trained to solve issues quickly, this was surprisingly difficult. Too often, legal professionals optimise solutions for problems they haven’t fully defined. By slowing down, participants uncovered root causes that would have otherwise been masked by surface-level fixes. 

Notably, for the first two days of the event, we were forbidden from using AI tools. Anyone who knows me will tell you I can't get through a dinner without bringing up AI. If I haven't tried to suggest it as a solution to (almost) any problem within the first five minutes, check my pulse.  

But stripping it away for two days forced us back to first principles — sticky notes, whiteboards, actual conversation. And what was fascinating was watching how the students, who are completely AI-native and reach for it like we'd reach for a Google search, adapted just as quickly to working without it. When we were finally let loose on day three, the combination of human thinking and AI execution was genuinely powerful.  

The lesson was clear: sometimes you need to slow down to speed up. 

Technology problem or people problem?  

Perhaps the most important insight was that many of the legal industry’s biggest challenges are not technology problems at all. They’re people problems. Over and over, our discussions came to the point that systems fail not because the technology is insufficient, but because they don’t align with how people actually work.  

Here's an example that stuck with me: firms invest heavily in capturing what they know — documents, emails, billing records, contacts. But alongside all of that sits a layer of tacit knowledge that no system has ever captured: Whether a client prefers to receive bad news over the phone or via email. The rate arrangement nobody documented. That “at your convenience” actually means within 48 hours.  

Every firm knows this knowledge exists. Many have tried to capture it. All of those efforts have relied on people voluntarily doing extra, non-billable work to record what they know. And that's exactly why they fail. The technology was never the problem. The ask was. Successful technology adoption depends on minimising behavioural change rather than maximising features. If your solution requires people to work differently, it's already fighting an uphill battle.  

The human stakes of legal work 

Finally, the conversations repeatedly circled back to something that’s often overlooked in legal tech discussions: what it can offer beyond efficiency.  

One comment stuck with me. An in-house lawyer on another team said something along the lines of: “I didn't leave private practice because I couldn't hack it. I left because I wanted to build something, not just advise on it.” For the in-house legal teams I work with, success isn't just about risk mitigation or cost control. It's about being recognised as a strategic part of the business, not a cost centre. It's about feeling core to how the company builds its strategy. It's about career growth. And yes, it's also about reclaiming enough headspace to actually enjoy the life outside of work. 

Technology plays a supporting role in that journey, not the starring one. By reducing administrative burden and improving governance, it creates space for professionals to focus on higher-impact work and reclaim autonomy over their time. 

Start with listening

That's ultimately what LWOW reinforced for me – technology works best when it's built around people, not the other way around.  

The themes that came up over and over — knowledge loss, adoption, behavioural change — aren't conference talking points. They're Monday morning problems. If they sound familiar, explore what iManage is building or book a conversation.