The Innovators – ‘Press Conference’

Katie stood outside the managing partner’s door like a naughty student. Tim had sent everyone else away so he could have a solitary, emergency brainstorm.

Meanwhile, the others were now standing nervously at the back of the currently speakerless Project Rubicon press conference, wondering if anyone from the firm would ever take the podium, while deflecting questions from the annoyed journalists about when things would start.

The firm’s head of innovation breathed in deeply, as she had been taught at yoga. ‘Did I cause this crisis?’ Katie asked herself. ‘Yes, you did. But you had no choice,’ replied another part of her.

‘You can come back in now,’ Timothy Marks intoned from within.

When she had shut the door behind her, he began, not waiting for her to sit. Much as he wanted to take responsibility for this mess, he explained, he had not caused this fiasco. Right now they had about five minutes to save the firm’s reputation. His as well, he added.

Katie nodded in agreement and waited for the next bit. But Smyth & Marmalade’s elected leader, this primus inter pares of the equity partners, seemed to have nothing else to say. They stared at each other across the huge desk. The seconds ticked painfully by on the clock behind the managing partner.

Eventually the silence was too much.

‘Sir? What are we going to do?’

‘We?’ he replied with a grin that she didn’t like very much. ‘You are going to go out there and you will absorb the poison. Every arrow. Every barbed question. You are going to talk the firm’s reputation out of the jaws of ridicule – if I am allowed such a metaphor.’

‘Me?’

‘You’re the head of innovation, aren’t you? Go and innovate a speech. You’re obviously brilliant at thinking up devastating things at the last minute. You got us into this predicament, you get us out of it.’

She gulped. Disagreed profoundly with his take on the situation, but ascertained an argument about blame would have to wait. Katie took another long, deep breath and in that instant realised she stood half-way between resignation and a fantastic opportunity. She chose the latter.

‘OK. But, I want a pay rise if I do this.’

He nodded.

‘And more staff. And a nicer office, not that bloody glass cubicle that’s so small it makes me feel like I’m part of a Damien Hirst formaldehyde installation.’

He paused for a split second, then nodded again.

‘And I work from home four days a week.’

‘Don’t push it, Katie.’

                                                                         

Back in her office, Katie Downer felt ecstatic. Had they really applauded? The media? Or was that just the home team trying desperately to leave things on a good note? No, unless she had developed a very sudden case of false memory, they had actually applauded.

Emily and Fred walked, or rather squeezed, into her tiny office.

‘Amazing!’ they said in unison, ‘ “No more bullshit about AI, not from us, not ever again!” ‘

‘Oh my God, I actually said that?’

‘Yes, you did,’ Emily replied, grinning from ear to ear, and raised up her hand to reveal her phone, set for playback.

‘You have all been told we have a massive announcement,’ came Katie’s recorded voice, a bit muffled, but the words clear enough. ‘But that is not true. We have nothing to announce. That is, unless an outbreak of the need to be frank and open with you is something your news outlets would classify as something worth printing.’

In the press conference Katie had then taken a long pause and savoured the look on the managing partner’s blanching face, then proceeded to ‘tell it like it is’ about legal AI: all the challenges, all the possibilities, and the simple reality that their firm, like everyone else’s, had not figured it out yet, in fact were desperately putting on a brave face while trying to digest the fact that their business model – that had been so successful for so long – was now in effect …. over.

The only thing she left out was the part where they had actually given the green light to the massive project to build their own AI system, right down to buying in GPUs and hiring a crack team of PhDs to do the training.

Moreover, she had rather redefined Project Rubicon. Now it was what she had just said: a bold, honest take on the legal world’s predicament in the face of a technology that at least for many large commercial law firms was the antithesis of everything they stood for.

The Rubicon that they had crossed was not the launch of some fancy new AI project, but the open admission of what AI would mean for the firm.

‘We have no absolute answers. We are as lost as everyone else. The difference is that we are telling you this. But, we invite you all to come on this journey with us. It may take years to get where we need to be to fully embrace the power of AI and to truly transform our business model – and how we work with clients, but we are up for it, and with the inspirational leadership of our managing partner, Timothy Marks, we shall succeed!’

She had stopped there, the adrenalin surging. For a moment the room was silent, and then they had clapped. Not polite applause, but a real response, a gut reaction to someone not just reeling out the prepared lines for once.

As she had passed along the back of the room where a very surprised and also relieved Timothy Marks stood, she had whispered: ‘You owe me!’

                                                           

It was a couple of days later and the young man sitting next to Katie on the train into London was clearly a lawyer, given what he was looking at on his open laptop. Luckily for him he wasn’t so daft as to show any sensitive files, just a stream of legal news websites that he was reading. He seemed to be especially interested in anything about the Magic Circle law firms.

She wasn’t paying much attention, but then something caught her eye. It was her photo. Now, in the last few days she had seen herself – with a very unflattering picture she felt, about which she had reminded the PR team – staring back from the screen multiple times as her Rubicon ‘Moment of AI Truth’ speech reverberated around the legal village.

But, this was different. Her face had been Photoshopped to give her a very long nose, a bit like…no, exactly like Pinocchio. Suddenly her gaze zeroed in on the headline: ‘Insider Says Rubicon Was A Load of Hot Marmalade!’

The man with the laptop noticed her intense glance and turned to her, ready to provide a typically British look of understated disappointment at her invasion of his private space….but then paused and did a double take. Now he started to grin.

‘Could I read that?’ she asked, and before he agreed snatched the laptop.

It was a story in ‘Redline’, a UK site mostly focused on law firm gossip and associate life. She felt a cold sweat break out on her brow.

‘A senior insider, who this site will naturally keep anonymous, has told us that the now famous…infamous?….rip-roaring outbreak of honesty at Smyth & Marmalade this week all about AI, delivered by its head of innovation – one Katherine Downer – was in fact a steaming cauldron of rotten molasses.

‘Our insider gushed that despite what was said before our stunned fellow members of the press, the firm had in fact been about to unveil a massive investment into building their own AI platform and had only pulled out of announcing it at the last minute when they realised what a colossal and risky undertaking it would be. Has Smyth & Marmalade just hoodwinked the market?’

She paused for a second to absorb it, but then she felt her phone – set to vibrate – having something of a seismic shock.

‘Well,’ said the young lawyer sitting next to her as he retook his laptop, ‘looks like you’re in for an interesting morning.’

—

Part Two of ‘The Innovators’ is here. The Part One link is also below.

Part One is here. Part Four will arrive next week. 

[ Copyright © 2026, Richard Tromans, Published by Artificial Lawyer Limited in the U.K. All rights reserved. This work of fiction may not be republished or reproduced without permission. The moral right of the author has been asserted. All characters are fictitious and any resemblance to any persons living, dead, or virtual, is purely coincidental. ]