LegalTechTalk 2026: Privacy, AI and the New Legal Engineer – Ben Martin – E05

You can hear Rob and Ben discussing:

Connect with Ben Martin here: 

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ben-martin-

Transcript

What happens when the brightest minds in legal, technology, and innovation come together to shape the future of our profession? Welcome to the Legally Speaking podcast Legal Tech Talk 2026 miniseries. As the UK’s number one legal podcast and show ranked in the top 1% of podcasts globally, we’re delighted to be returning as the official media partner for Legal Tech Talk for the third time. Having supported this event since the beginning.

We’ve witnessed firsthand how it has become Europe’s largest legal technology conference, bringing together the people, ideas, and innovations transforming the legal industry. Across this special series, we’ll be speaking with some of the world’s leading legal professionals, founders, technologists, change makers to explore what’s next for law. Because our mission remains the same. Inspiring legal minds, transforming legal futures. Let’s get into it.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Legally Speaking podcast sponsored by Clio recording live here at Legal Tech Talk in London. Joining me now is another fantastic guest. Please kindly introduce yourself, name, title, and organisation. Hey, my name’s Ben Martin. I am a legal engineer and the head of privacy at Wordsmith, which is a legal AI platform for in-house lawyers. Absolutely, and you’re doing a fantastic job, it has to be said, and very present here.

at Legal Tech Talk twenty twenty six. the big theme about this year is transformation. In your view, what’s the bing biggest single shift in the legal industry right now that people can no longer afford to ignore? So I think at a very high level it’s probably AI adoption. So using AI in some sense. Yeah. We see so I work in AI, so I see a lot of people starting to adopt it. And where we see teams really getting excited and starting to gather pace and build on it, you see the transformation happen massively.

probably then a sort of micro level, I think agent adoption and building of workflows that are more complex than just taking your problem to a tool to fix it. That for me feels like the next step on. ⁓ and we had a really great session with people building lots of cool stuff today. So yeah, it’s been really good. Yeah, and I think it’s ⁓ a really valid point. Legal Tech Talk 2026, this year has really ramped up. What drew you to Legal Tech Talk 2026 and what’s been a highlight for you thus far? Yeah, so it’s actually my first time ever.

coming here. ⁓ and I think well the reason I’m here is because Wordsmith have we’re one of the ⁓ I think Diamond sponsors so we we have a full ⁓ s sort of squad here today. ⁓ but the thing that I think has been absolutely brilliant is just the conversations with so many different people ⁓ and just the scale of it and meeting people who I’ve not seen. We bumped into Henry earlier and like people I’ve not seen in years and it’s it’s actually really nice to just

See that whole legal community. Yeah, absolutely. And Henry Nelson case, we’re big fans of here on the show. He’s also been on the show. Go and check out his episode. He’s also at that corporate lawyer on socials. Okay, the problem. What is the problem or challenge you’re fixated about trying to solve and why should people care about it in the legal industry? So I’m my background is data protection. I’m a privacy lawyer and I have been

Hounding and haranguing everyone within Wordsmith, talking about records of processing activity and the big data protection challenges. So we hear a lot about contract law and redlining within the AI world. But there’s this whole piece for privacy lawyers, for compliance, for risk governance professionals. And that feels to me a little step behind. And I really think that building these tools is going to be a massive leap forward for them because they’re

Things like record of processing activity, subject access requests, really time consuming, really repetitive. And there’s so much that can be done to save save time. And I guess the kind of overarching theme of why I care about this and why I’m passionate about it is because it just makes people’s jobs more fun. Like I had so many things in my last role which were very manual and quite frustrating. and if you can just take that out such that you can actually interact with the business, think about cool stuff that you can drive forward. ⁓

Yeah, that’s what I care about. Good for you. Okay, let’s talk about the human impact now. We’ve talked a lot about technology, automation, innovation. But if we get this right, what’s the real human impact? How does it improve life for lawyers, legal teams, clients, and overall society? Yeah. So I think that point I mentioned for the last question around the sort of making people’s jobs better for me is the is the first step. Then I would say you are starting to see people being able to focus on the work.

people who say like strategic work and there’s questions around what is strategic work. I think people just focus on the work that they should be doing and that people have spent time training and developing and really building those skills. So for me, I think the quality of work people do will improve and yeah, it will it will make everyone’s jobs better. In terms of the the sort of wider benefits to the business that people work in, the organizations, they will see an improved relationship with

legal teams rather than being this stretched team that are always exhausted and kind of on the verge of burnout, they will be able to get on the front foot and do stuff quickly, serve their stakeholders really nicely. And I guess from a a wider ⁓ societal perspective, I think, well, I I think there’s a lot of potential benefits for AI ⁓ more more broadly, but probably in the legal context, I don’t know, happier lawyers maybe and going about their day. Let’s hope for that. Let’s hope for that.

Let’s fast forward a few years now. Let’s say it’s twenty thirty. what will seem completely obvious in twenty thirty that most people in the legal world are still underestimating now? Yeah. I would say probably don’t need to wait to twenty thirty, but like every year in AI I think is kind of four normal years pre-AI. Stuff goes so quickly. so the the thing that I think’s gonna happen over the next twelve months, and we’ve we’ve been talking a lot about this at Wordsmith, is

That we are going to move from this point tool where you take the work and you do your work in a tool ⁓ to AI, legal AI specifically, becoming almost like infrastructure in the same way you would say ⁓ your email is is infrastructure. So I think this will take the format broadly of an end-to-end workflow. So you get your intake from email, from Slack, from whatever it might be, comes in, you have built agents, you’ve designed your workflows, it does the work.

You then review it and then you approve, take actions, whatever needs to be done. So you’re doing that from within the AI tool rather than jumping around from lots of different tools. Very concise. Like it. Okay, if you have the attention, which I’m sure you do by now, of every law firm leader, general counsel, managing partner, legal operations professional listening and watching this episode right now, what’s one action they should take in the next 90 days to be better prepared for the future? I think for me and I will

always say this in any question like this is start using voice. So dictating your prompts, dictating what you want to build agents when you’re using AI, just use voice. The technology is really good now for it. And you speak faster, you can come up with more ideas, you give more context. So the output that comes out the other side is always much better. ⁓ I would say there is a two to three month period of feeling like a complete weirdo ⁓ in the office doing it. But

⁓ actually once you start doing it, you notice that everyone around you is like, that’s cool and and gets involved. Agreed. You know, voice data, conversational data as well, acquiring that. It’s it’s it’s powerful stuff. Okay, w we’re all about inspiring legal minds, transforming legal futures on the League’s Beam podcast. So final question. What’s one skill, mindset or behavior you believe will separate tomorrow’s leaders from everyone else? Yeah. Simple for me it’s just curiosity, ⁓ combined with creativity. I think

with AI we are moving to a place where people no longer need to get external support in legal teams. So if you’re have ideas and you’re able to ⁓ think creatively about solving a problem, that can be the start of finding a solution and linking that with an AI tool. yeah, so I I I think just you start to see especially a lot of in house lawyers have gone on a bit of a wiggly career path. They’ve not necessarily

felt fit in fit in in certain environments in law firms. So as you see, mm we’re specifically for in-house lawyers. So I talk to a lot of in-house lawyers and you see them be very yeah, very creative in their thinking. So I think they’re very well placed to move forward. Love it. CC, I like that. Okay, on the curious osty side. ⁓ if people want to know more about yourself, Wordsmith AI, where do they need to go? Feel free to share any websites, any social media handles. We’ll also share them this episode for you too. Cool. thanks very much Rob. ⁓

Yeah, so I I’m on LinkedIn, I post quite a bit on there. ⁓ I have also written a book, GDPR for startups and scale-ups, and I actually have a podcast. It’s not not competing with yours, it’s specifically for privacy and AI, and that’s called Subject Access. Brilliant. ⁓ regarding Wordsmith, we are wordsmith.ai. ⁓ and yeah, that p if people are interested, they can just reach out to me and we can chat on that. Perfect. Let’s leave as we say, thank you so much for joining me live here on the Legal Team Podcast at Legal Tech Talk twenty twenty six.

From all of us on the Legal Speaking Podcast sponsored by Clear Over and Ow. Thank you for listening to this week’s episode. If you like the content here, why not check out our world leading content and collaboration hub, the Legally Speaking Club, over on Discord? Go to our website, www.legallyspeakingpodcast.com. There’s a link to join our community there. Over and out.