How Technology is Changing the Business of Law

Technology and Law. Technology presents opportunities for honing processes and rethinking traditional models in the business of law. Here are three ways technology is changing and benefiting the legal field right now.



 Artificial Intelligence and Technology-Assisted Review Streamline Discovery

Artificial intelligence (AI) and technology-assisted review (TAR) have spurred a dramatic shift in discovery protocol. AI software can identify patterns in huge data sets to enable category coding that streamlines document review — reducing the time, effort and number of attorneys required for manual review. Similarly, TAR focuses and expedites the human review process by using keywords and other metadata to identify and tag potentially relevant documents. Firms and legal departments using these technologies can perform a discovery over a shorter window of time and at a lower cost.

Remote-Work Tools Promote Culture of Work-Life Balance

Technology has also contributed to the institution of flex-time, telecommuting and other alternative work arrangements. Equipped with digital risk management solutions that protect information and systems through sophisticated cybersecurity measures, lawyers can now access their firms’ systems to connect with colleagues, clients and put in billable hours from just about anywhere.

Social Media Opens Doors to Broader Communication

Social networking is becoming an indispensable tool for many law practices. LinkedIn, for example, enables confidential recruiting activities as well as opportunities to build professional networks.

Some Upcoming trends:

Trend No. 1: By 2025, legal departments will increase their spend on legal technology threefold

The proportion of legal budgets spent on technology is set to increase drastically by 2025, according to a 2020 Gartner survey of legal leaders. Legal leaders are seeing that other departments have found success with their tech investments and also significant advancements in the legal tech market. This is driving their appetite to expand their use of technology to support workflows and meet productivity demands. Developing a multiyear legal technology strategy that can evolve with changes in the corporate environment and advancements in the technology market will be critical to success. Legal departments should avoid ad hoc technology purchases that are poorly aligned to supporting the function in achieving short- and long-term business goals. 

Trend No. 2: By 2024, legal departments will replace 20% of generalist lawyers with nonlawyer staff

The trend of increasing workloads and flat budgets puts a premium on efficiency. This means that legal departments must improve their processes, legal technology implementation, analytics and other digitalization strategies to support this increased workload.

The next several years will focus more aggressively on continually weighing resource decisions for specific areas of work.

Trend No. 3: By 2024, legal departments will have automated 50% of legal work related to major corporate transactions.

Traditionally, larger workloads could only be met through higher in-house productivity or costly outside counsel. Advances in natural language processing and machine learning (ML) technologies open a third way for handling these critical tasks. “The key to success is to first identify specific issues that can be solved with automation”

Trend No. 4: By 2025, corporate legal departments will capture only 30% of the potential benefit of their contract life cycle management investments.

As noted, automation is no silver bullet. Just because work can be automated doesn’t mean that it’s simple or easy to succeed. The most expansive, highest-potential solutions, such as ML-driven contract reviews, carry a great deal of complexity in the underlying functionality. Failing to correct unrealistic stakeholder expectations for a technology’s payback period can contribute to the perception of problems.

Trend No. 5: By 2025, at least 25% of spending on corporate legal applications will go to nonspecialist technology providers.

Specialist technology vendors have long dominated the legal tech market, with the largest general-purpose enterprise software vendors making limited inroads among corporate legal departments. However, demand for legal and compliance transformation now transcends the departments themselves as CEOs, CFOs and CIOs recognize the strategic value of legal and compliance.

Use of non-legal-specialist technology is also coming from the other end of the vendor spectrum, as innovative startups exploit artificial intelligence (AI), ML, advanced analytics, process automation and other emerging technologies.

Location: Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India

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