LegalTech - just a craze?

Legal Technology; here is a term which I am certain that the vast majority of legal scientists have already heard many times now. Either as an academic, a student, lecturer, professor, or researcher like me, or as member of the legal industry. Whether that be in a law firm, start-up or private law office, or even in any other kind of profession working closely with the legal sector, chances are that you’ve got wind of crypto-assets, tokens and smart contracts, blockchains, artificial intelligence, document automation, or contract management and review software.  If you are a bit more into tech applications, automated decision making, NLP, tokenized contracts, machine learning, NFTs, neural networks, and the list could go on and on.

And yet, only a few years ago, most of us, including myself, had never heard any of those incredible instruments before and probably did not think we would either. Here we are, though, much closer to meeting our sci-fi fantasy. The reasons behind this sudden and galloping change are many in number, spanning across a wide spectrum of causes, consisting of factual reasons such as the former lack of technical development and the lack of necessary computational power to store the enormous volume of data needed to run such perplexing algorithms and software, and the lack of investment funding. But there are also situational factors, although of equal driving force, like “trending” and the following hype, which fire significant industry involvement.

I would like, in this post, to address two points of significance, in my opinion, that people should have in mind when thinking about legal technology.

The first observation that I wanted to discuss in this post and probably the most important, in my belief, is the importance of multidisciplinary communication and cooperation. Law used to be a conservative science (one could argue about the elitist stance of law towards the rest of the sciences) which had, over the years, created a closed network, with fortified fences against external suggestions, ideas, and changes. For many decades, law had kept its own pace, being accessible only to the experts and with a tendency to stick to the “if it works, it doesn’t need changing” methodology, staying closer to the 1800s rather than 2021. In the last few years, however, it has become evident that “it doesn’t work anymore” and keeping apart from the rest of innovation and refusing change may not be the optimal practice for the evolution of law. On the contrary, working together with computer scientists, marketing experts and a variety of other professionals, provides useful input and solutions to many spoken and unspoken problems, with an array of fresh ideas and creative problem solving, proving the positive influence of open discussion and communication of information between industries. Unsurprisingly, research showcases the same results, as law firms that also hire technical professionals, instead of solely relying on legal experts, display multiple times higher revenue and growthrates than the ones sticking to the traditional model. In a few words, multidisciplinary communication stands as a steppingstone of profit, both for legal science and your personal wallet.

The second point relates to the effect of the pandemic on the stance of the global market and the people on the unavoidable disturbance disruptive technologies brought about on the relative industries.  With the impact of Covid-19, it soon became obvious that the survival of the economy and businesses would be highly based on the implementation of a new business model, which would be supported by the available technology. Moreover, the need of a hasty transition exhausted any second thoughts about the adoption of new and untested technologies, which usually slowed things down. However, even though the pandemic played a decisive role on the friendly uptake and the building of trust over these changes that were basically uncharted water, legal technology has not spawned as an answer or alternative solution in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is not a coping mechanism, quickly put in place to respond to the crisis. On the contrary, the power of technology to help drive innovation in the legal sector, has been identified much earlier and scientists have been researching opportunities and feasibility of tech implementations in legal services all the way back to the 90’s and maybe even before that. Let’s not make the mistake of looking at LegalTech from the angle of a new-born science or trend that has just made a coincidental appearance as a way to cope with the sudden crisis.

In the Legal Innovation Lab Wales, we took this idea of collaborative work and shaped it into our own everyday reality. Bringing together practitioners, academics and policymakers, we envisage a new, open, inclusive and collaborative LegalTech community, always growing and striving for innovation. Connecting expert professionals across a variety of fields with diverse knowledge and backgrounds we are committed towards contributing to the advancement of the legal sector by exploring LegalTech developments, researching novel applications, developing solutions and supporting change. If you are interested in learning more about LegalTech or have a project idea that you want to develop further, do not hesitate to contact us!