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June 18, 2025
We had a great time at the 55th BIALL Annual Conference, and one of the highlights for us was getting to host the session Navigating the Future: Practical Approaches to Horizon Scanning.
Vable’s Philippa McIntosh was joined by expert speakers Julie Ferris and Diane Stitt, Research Analysts at A&O Shearman, for the talk that veered from how AI is impacting scanning, to how many alerts they use (a lot of you were shocked).
A&O Shearman have an established reputation as innovators, especially in the adoption and development of legal technology. The firm won Most Innovative Law Firm in Europe at the FT Innovative Lawyers Awards in 2024, so the audience were keen to see how they were tackling this increasingly important task - and how Vable supported them in this work.
A Changing Landscape
The talk took place on the first day of the 55th BIALL Conference, on June 11th, 2025, and the purpose was to provide an overview of horizon scanning, how it differs from current awareness, as well as some practical tips and how to overcome common challenges.
The landscape of current awareness and horizon scanning is rapidly changing, with the challenges posed by AI, tightening copyright rules, increasing bans on crawlers and scrapers, and escalating information overload.
In this fact-filled 45-minute session, Julie, Diane, and Philippa provided practical advice for legal information professionals for their own horizon scanning. For those who couldn't attend, or want a concise recap, here are the key takeaways and a few highlights.
What’s It All About?
We heard from Diane and Julie how horizon scanning is distinct from current awareness, but follows a lot of the same processes. While current awareness focuses on what is happening now and in the immediate future, horizon scanning looks at the longer-term trends that may emerge.
- Legal & regulatory - monitoring new or changes to legislation, tracking a case, policy updates, and regulatory shifts.
- Market & industry trends - keeping track of sector developments, or competitor activity
- Countries/regions - macroeconomic shifts that could impact clients, trends, and market intelligence in specific regions
- Client/company news - following key clients, industries, and stakeholders to anticipate needs and opportunities.
Legal information professionals typically scan for lawyers, marketing, business development, and knowledge teams - but as Julie noted, other departments like HR, IT, finance, and risk also benefit. Importantly, clients are indirect recipients too, gaining from enhanced advice even if they don’t see the alerts themselves.
Delivering Best Practice
One of the big takeaways was how important a good brief is - Diane stressed the importance of a proper conversation to understand what a lawyer actually wants from their alert. Be meticulous with search terms, spelling, and phrasing, and remember that journalists and legal sources often describe the same thing very differently, so you need to cover both angles.
Diane and Julie also discussed the value of preparation: do your own research when topics are vague, build reusable search strings, and use all the features your platform offers. Consistency helps too: naming conventions and smart labelling make it easier to manage alerts, especially across teams. Julie nearly brought the house down by revealing that the A&O Shearman team manages 2000 alerts - so they are the voices of authority here!
Finally, stay alert to the news. Being commercially and legally aware helps you spot opportunities to offer new alerts or tweak existing ones when something changes, like a merger or major regulation.
Challenges And Considerations
A key point raised was about managing expectations - alerts don’t need to be perfect. Be honest about what is possible and achievable, especially under time pressure, and focus on what you can deliver. Repurposing content across projects can help save time. Having open conversations with stakeholders is crucial at this stage.
The panel also discussed access to high-quality sources. The pros and cons of both free and paid were explored, as well as the importance of using them responsibly, especially regarding copyright. Vable’s Philippa said that platforms can be a key tool to help firms stay compliant with copyright laws while sharing information effectively, and partnering with publishers to avoid scraping and crawling bans.
Other tips included: training colleagues in different regions to help with foreign-language sources, using auto-translation when needed, monitoring engagement with alerts to see what’s working, and not being afraid to fine-tune or drop underperforming ones. Ultimately, alerts are “a shop window, not a basket full of goods”.
What Are The Benefits?
The panel then looked at the benefits of an information management platform, such as Vable, when it comes to carrying out horizon scanning.
They discussed two types of benefits - direct and indirect. The direct benefits are how horizon scanning can massively improve a legal information professional’s broad knowledge on a range of topics. Thus, improving their searches going forward and the firm’s offering to clients. The time saved from manual searching also directly impacts the bottom line.
Indirectly, a platform can help raise the profile of the library team. By bringing all of the updates, alerts and emails into the same branding, more people are more aware of the work done by the team. Furthermore, information collected by the platform can provide essential analytics to inform budget decisions.
Other Highlights
- Scoping is critical - getting the brief right determines the alert’s usefulness.
- Effective horizon scanning relies on a mix of sources - news, trade journals, legal content, government feeds.
- Use both free and paid sources - but be aware of licensing, API access restrictions, and copyright.
- Automation vs curation - automation scales well, but curated alerts offer precision.
- Usage stats reveal what’s working - don’t be afraid to drop alerts that no one engages with.
- AI is a helpful tool, especially for summarising, trend spotting, and refining searches - but it still needs human oversight and sense-checking.
Final Thoughts
The panel was a practical guide on horizon scanning with one of the industry's innovators. It was a great opportunity for Vable to share the stage with experts to share knowledge with the wider community.
And it was fantastic to see how engaged the audience was; there were some really insightful questions in the session Q&A, and then in the conference in the following days.
Horizon scanning might not be on the agenda of most law firms this year, but it is coming, and hopefully, the attendees of BIALL will be readier than most.
To speak to Vable about how we can help you with Horizon Scanning, or information management, get in touch.