Legal Cheek Careers sits down with tech entrepreneur and ULaw visiting professor Adam Roney
Adam Roney’s route into law was never quite the standard one. Before the training contract, the legal tech consultancy, or the visiting professorship at The University of Law, there was an eight-year-old with a family computer and a coding habit his parents, as he puts it, “indulged”.
“Back then, you essentially had to program a computer to get it to do anything,” he recalls. “As soon as I realised I could code and create new things, I had the bug.” By 13 he was building websites; before long, he had a small hosting company and a web design business on the side.
When it came to university, Roney chose PPE at York rather than computer science. He had already proven himself as a coder, and he was drawn to the broader scope of politics, philosophy and economics. Law was already on the radar, and halfway through his degree he began applying for vacation schemes with an eye on corporate commercial work. A placement at Eversheds (now Eversheds Sutherland) in Leeds showed him he “could do big corporate law without being in London”. Schemes in the capital followed, but the vibe never felt quite right. His sweet spot, he concluded, was doing the work he enjoyed in a regional setting.
Once there, he was drawn back towards the thing he had been doing since childhood. The firm ran a global competition on how technology could be used to deliver client services differently, around the time, as Roney puts it, “the iPhone and cloud computing were taking off”. He co-designed a platform giving clients access to matter information from a single dashboard. The idea won the competition, and he spent much of his training contract developing a product that rolled out to major clients and eventually became a separate business unit.
That experience proved decisive. “I enjoyed the intersection of tech and law more than the direct practice of law,” he says. On qualification, he left to set up a consultancy and software development business. For the past 14 years he has worked with professional services organisations worldwide on improving client and employee experiences and helping them develop new business models, a journey that led him into generative AI and, most recently, to founding Kalisa, a company helping organisations in regulated sectors use AI safely and responsibly.
It also brought him back into legal education. Through his work with ULaw, Roney was offered a visiting professorship, a role in which he tries to give students “a 360-degree view” of a profession with “more dimensions than it appears”. With new technology-infused roles emerging and the SQE opening up more varied pathways into law, he argues that legal careers are becoming more open, making it easier for students to find a path that genuinely fits their interests.
That breadth of perspective sits at the heart of ULaw’s upcoming session on AI, legal tech and training the next generation of lawyers. The pitch is not that junior lawyers need to become software engineers overnight. It is that firms increasingly need trainees who can do more than open an AI tool and hope for the best. They need to understand, as Roney puts it, “where the technology is strong and where it isn’t”.
He sees the use cases for generative AI in law falling into two broad categories: internal and client-facing. Internally, the biggest opportunity is eliminating administrative grind. “When I was a trainee, we did highly manual tasks for weeks that weren’t enjoyable for us or great for clients to pay for,” he says. AI is already driving efficiencies in document review, due diligence, legal research and drafting, and improving lawyer satisfaction by taking away many of the thankless tasks in between.
Some traditional trainee tasks, he argues, could simply fade away. “Tasks like manually putting documents in chronological order, which I did for months, shouldn’t happen anymore.” AI can handle chronologies, document organisation, case summaries and initial analysis. Legal research, too, is shifting, a point Roney makes with a telling detail: “At law school, I did legal research in physical libraries; that is very rare now.” Used properly, AI becomes “an assistant that sits alongside you”. For juniors there is an added bonus: “You can ask an AI questions you might be afraid to ask a supervising partner.” It is, he suggests, “a non-judgmental way for trainees to learn as quickly as possible”.
Access to AI platforms, though, is only part of the picture. The harder question is judgement. “The key is human oversight,” Roney says, “or what we in the industry call a ‘human in the loop’.” His warning is blunt: “You must check your AI because no AI is 100% right 100% of the time.” Regulators and professional standards require lawyers to be fully engaged in the process, regardless of how the work was produced.
The risks, he stresses, are as much cultural as technical. AI can hallucinate, making things up or misquoting sources, and when that happens in a professional context there is no passing the blame. “The buck stops with you. You are responsible for your work, whether it is AI-augmented or not.”
He is equally keen to stress that not all AI tools are equal. “Using a purpose-built legal platform, that is private and regulatory compliant, is more sensible than simply using a generic tool like ChatGPT.” Even the same prompt can behave unpredictably, with the same question yielding different answers on different occasions. What future lawyers need, he argues, is layered competence, not blind confidence. “You need to be technically literate, legally literate and critically literate. If you combine an understanding of the technology with relevant domain expertise and critical thinking, you stand a great chance of getting the most out of it.”
Firms should be clear about which tools they want their teams to use, while being honest about what those tools can and cannot do. Without that clarity, they risk a culture clash between those who are tech-averse and those who think AI solves everything. The underlying message, though, is reassuring: “No one is trying to replace sound legal judgment. The fundamentals of being a great lawyer will stand for a long time.”
For students and junior lawyers, Roney’s outlook is ultimately an optimistic one. His work at ULaw is about helping students understand what these changes mean and which pitfalls to avoid, while ensuring their skills retain real value in the workforce. He wants to give them what he calls the “superpowers” needed to deal with change.
“Change in the legal sector is happening very rapidly now,” he says. “That can be unnerving, but smart, engaged people who understand these changes will be in high demand.” For those willing to develop the right mental model and framework thinking, the future is bright and, Roney says, “they can look forward to an exciting and dynamic career”.
Adam Roney will be speaking on ULaw’s panel, ‘Beyond the hype: What trainee lawyers need to understand about AI’ at LegalEdCon 2026, Legal Cheek’s annual future of legal education and training conference, which takes place in-person TOMORROW at Kings Place, London.
View this post on Instagram
About Legal Cheek Careers posts.
