James Hogan. Image: Darragh Kane
James Hogan, CTO of legal tech solutions company Bundledocs, discusses major tech trends such as AI regulation.
James Hogan is co-founder and chief technical officer (CTO) of Bundledocs, an Irish company that provides legal tech solutions globally.
Hogan, who graduated from Kingston University, London with a MSc in web development, has more than a decade of professional experience leading a variety of software projects and teams.
In his current role, his primary function is to identify technological solutions that accelerate the process of achieving goals set out in the company’s business strategy.
“The overarching philosophy that I instill in my department is to always be improving. By living this every day, we continually push our technology stack towards the bleeding edge.”
What are some of the biggest challenges you’re facing in the current IT landscape and how are you addressing them?
At Bundledocs, we have adopted and implemented security best practices into our everyday processes. We develop our software against a well-defined, privacy-first, secure development policy that respects industry standards and guidelines such as the OWASP top 10 or NIST six steps.
Unlike many businesses within the IT industry, we are in a position where we have not been forced to make layoffs. In fact, we are actively looking to hire new employees across our business as we continue to grow globally.
Bundledocs is dedicated to improving and leading compliance efforts which align with the obligations our customers have to their clients. Historically, primarily larger organisations would have required a detailed compliance relationship. Today, even our smallest prospects are compliance-conscious, and their awareness of their own security obligations is growing. With that, we are exploring how we can use the power of transformer AI models trained on our own compliance documents to help us prepare the first draft of compliance questionnaires we receive from customers.
‘Leaving AI unregulated would be akin to allowing driverless cars on our roads without the necessary safeguards in place to protect the public’
What are your thoughts on digital transformation in a broad sense within your industry?
With remote and hybrid working being prominent features in firms around the world, companies have begun to digitally transform, looking for ways in which their businesses can operate efficiently. As our solution helps to digitally transform firms within the legal and government sectors, we believe that digital transformation is required to meet demand across industries.
A good example of how we are continuing to address digital transformation would be the introduction of our PDF editing solution. This custom-built, in-browser editor was developed in response to the demand from our customers for an easy-to-use, cost-effective, cloud-based PDF editing solution.
Sustainability has become a key objective for businesses in recent years. What are your thoughts on how this can be addressed from an IT perspective?
The IT sector is in a unique position that ensures it can provide solutions to meet sustainability requirements. Our own solution was created to move the paper-heavy legal firm to digital by allowing users to prepare quality professional briefs, document bundles, reports, eBooks, electronic binders and PDF documents in a fraction of the time it previously would have taken. Using cloud solutions reduces the need for businesses to have physical files on site.
Further, there is a growing obligation placed upon software engineers to develop software in a way that is environmentally considerate. We see these environmental considerations appear in everyday applications such as our browsers when a tab goes to sleep while it’s not being used. We should be implementing these same environmental impact improvements in our own software. By reducing unnecessary computation in our own applications, as a collective we can reduce our environmental impact.
What big tech trends do you believe are changing the world and your industry specifically?
The technology landscape is always changing. New technology arrives with great hype and the industry scrambles to catch the wave and beat rivals. The biggest tech trend right now is how companies are looking to use transformer AI models to drive applications, such as ChatGPT. This technology is revolutionary and we’re only scratching the surface of what can be achieved.
I am very much looking forward to the introduction of regulation around the application of AI in technology. AI and machine learning models have the capacity to create code, respond to requests with tasks, and when hooked up correctly, can execute those tasks. Leaving AI unregulated would be akin to allowing driverless cars on our roads without the necessary safeguards in place to protect the public.
Rather than hindering competitiveness in Europe, I hope the AI Act will improve our understanding of the risks of working with these modern AI models and in turn give the public greater protection from poorly or nefariously implemented applications.
Another less topical trend in technology is serverless computing. Serverless computing allows software engineers to focus more on developing the code needed to implement a feature rather than configuring servers.
What are your thoughts on how we can address the security challenges currently facing your industry?
As a cloud-first solution with a client base that includes some of the world’s leading law firms and large government bodies, the security of our customers’ data is always our priority.
While our solution is secure, law firms and their clients continue to be targeted by cybercriminals as they look to obtain sensitive information. In order to address this issue, it is important that firms ensure that they choose their cloud storage providers carefully to ensure that they are compliant and have the measures in place to prevent cyberattacks from occurring.
All companies should implement a cybersecurity awareness training program to educate staff on the current cybersecurity threat landscape and how they as individuals can protect their organisation from the threats they will undoubtedly encounter.
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