Exploring resilience and innovation in law SMEs: Navigating global disruptions in the era of AI and digital transformation

The legal service industry, which relies heavily on SMEs and their entrepreneurship capacity, faces more uncertainty than ever before. Global disruption events like Covid-19, wars and climate change, on the one hand and technocentric status quo disruptors like AI, digitalisation and remote working on the other have redefined law SMEs’ pathways to prosperity. The paper explores how senior legal professionals working in the UK law SMEs sector view these challenges by analysing 20 semi-structured in-depth interviews. Five diverse themes, around innovation and resilience, emerged from a six-step thematic analysis that was benchmarked against a theoretical framework mixing Resource- and Practice-Based Views. These themes are resistance to innovation, talent management, economic pressures, cybersecurity and regulatory compliance . The results highlight the need for improved access to technology, increased preparedness against cyber threats, remote working normalisation, more IT-focused education, life-long training initiatives, flexible and evidence-based regulations and more custom-tailored support from the relevant authorities.