Iain Murdoch

Iain is head of legal AI at Mills & Reeve, and is based in our Birmingham office. He discusses his legal career and journey into legal tech and offers practical insights on using AI in law.

Can you tell us a bit about your journey into law and legal AI?

My journey into law wasn’t shaped by a grand plan – it was really about following what interested me. I’d always wanted to go to university and study something academic, but I hadn’t done the science A levels that would’ve nudged me towards a more scientific route. I enjoyed economics, but I didn’t see myself going into politics, so law felt like a natural fit as a subject with academic depth and a potential profession that I would enjoy at the end of it. I loved digging into ideas and the academic world, and law seemed like a fascinating space to explore.

I later began my career as a construction lawyer – an area of law I fell into almost by chance after finding myself in a training seat no one else put their hand up for! I ended up really enjoying the work: I liked the physicality of it (the projects existed in the real world) and that I wasn’t simply moving money around.

A few years on, as my family started to grow, I needed a change and moved away from frontline practice, going to work at Practical Law, an online legal know-how provider. There, I built Practical Law Construction from the ground up, before ending up leading some fantastic technology projects and discovering just how much I enjoyed working at the intersection of law, tech, and content. After several years there, I decided to make the move to a legal tech start up looking at legal AI and machine-learning tools to help in-house lawyers handle repeat, pattern-based work - long before ChatGPT existed!

What attracted you to Mills & Reeve?

A couple of years after working at the legal tech start up, I found myself wondering whether I could return to fee earning, but after so long outside frontline legal practice, I honestly wasn’t sure I could make the move back to being a solicitor again. But Mills & Reeve saw it differently, and that was a huge part of what drew me to the firm. It has a real openness to people who’ve taken different paths: those who’ve taken career breaks, changed direction, had families, worked in other industries, the list goes on. The firm doesn’t see those as barriers or things that should hold someone back.

What continues to make Mills & Reeve stand out to me is its strong, welcoming culture of inclusion, and the freedom to be different. It’s full of people with varied life journeys, and that mix is what creates such an invigorating environment and makes the firm what it is.

What inspired your move to head of legal AI, and how has it shaped your perspective?

I’ve always had an interest in technology. During my time at Practical Law, I got involved in major tech projects and worked closely with software developers, project managers and data scientists. That curiosity is what took me into the legal tech startup world and deeper into the world of legal AI.

When I returned to fee earning and construction law at Mills & Reeve, the world had changed. Post ChatGPT, it became clear that firms needed people who could understand both the technology and the realities of legal practice - client pressures, risks, the way lawyers think.

Having the opportunity to take on the head of legal AI role felt like stepping into something genuinely significant. For the first time, we have technology that can generate contextualised answers on the fly, without being explicitly programmed to respond to a specific question. That shift isn’t just big for the firm; it’s big for society, education, and the skills new lawyers and other colleagues arrive with.

It’s incredibly exciting to be part of shaping how the legal world responds to generative AI.

What’s your proudest career achievement to date?

On the construction law side, moments I really value are still visiting construction projects years after I worked on them. As a construction lawyer, you actually get to go and see the things you’ve helped bring into the world, and understanding the challenges that had to be overcome gives those visits real meaning.

Second, building Practical Law Construction from scratch is something I’ll always be hugely proud of. My team and I created resources that genuinely changed the way construction lawyers worked, from keeping them up to date with ever changing case law and regulations, to providing documents that both sides in a negotiation could agree on quickly to get a deal done.

Hearing years later that lawyers used our documents to complete deals swiftly feels like proof that the work had real, tangible impact, which is incredibly rewarding.

If you could share one practical tip for using AI in law, what would it be?

I would say find a safe way to experiment and play.

In law, I think one of the best ways you can do this is by taking a complex, publicly available case or piece of legislation, or a contract you can access online, and having a conversation with an AI tool about it. Not just one prompt — a proper back and forth conversation.

This is a highly effective way to see how AI can augment your thinking. It won’t get everything right, it won’t replace your judgement, and it certainly can’t read your mind, but it can become an assistant to your reasoning.

When I was training, there were often days spent standing at the photocopier - a task that barely exists now. AI will do the same to certain kinds of legal tasks – it’ll certainly be interesting to see what tasks become tomorrow’s “photocopying”! So, explore it, practise with it, and find out what works for you...and try and enjoy the process too.

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