Legal Accelerators 2.0
‘How many topics and discussions can spawn around LegalTech?’, one may ask.
Well, the Legal Accelerators 2.0 Conference is a perfect example of how many interesting conversations, solutions and, unfortunately, issues arise relating to the implementation of LegalTech solutions and the transformation of the legal profession/industry. With over 30 presentations from a wide range of speakers consisting of LegalTech startup CEO’s, founders, academics, organisation representatives, lawyers and more, the three-day conference attracted a high volume of interest by people excited to investigate what the future holds for the legal sector.
The discussions that took place over the course of the conference clearly showcased both the variety and the magnitude of the factors that have to be considered when talking about innovation. And although spending three days witnessing the major issues that must be addressed can be a bit discouraging at first glance, raising awareness is a crucial first step on the road towards change. Currently, the upcoming transformation of legal services seems inevitable; a fact that many legal professionals have already accepted and embraced, giving room for open discussions and brainstorming solutions. This was particularly apparent both in the presenters themselves and in the level of interactions from the audience.
As the variety of different discussions that took place was extremely high, we will not be able to cover all of them in this post. Rather, we are going to limit ourselves to those covered in greater detail or that were brought up multiple times during the event.
The first and foremost of the subjects that will always pop-up during a conversation on how to drive innovation, is data. “Data is everything now” is a sentence you will probably stumble upon many times when reading or listening to a podcast. That is because all the new and fancy tech solutions are only made possible through the manipulation of data (and we are not talking about the 1-2k documents you might have collected over the years in your personal PC, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of files). All the AI, machine learning, contract analysis, Client Lifecycle Management (CLM), Know-Your-Customer (KYC), matter management tools and such are the products of data exploitation algorithms. However, traditionally legal professionals are not fond of sharing their data and precious work, both for security and business reasons. On the other hand, others consider the value that could be extracted by sharing as far superior and the gains even more so, in both areas of concern. A strong argument they wield is the example of other industries that embraced change, such as accounting and finance. Hard to argue with theoretical arguments against a use-case example.
Another very intriguing discussion concerns the consequences of LegalTech implementation. Usually, in these technology friendly conferences, you only get to hear the advantages of such a change, which is of course well expected by the people excited for the future of the industry. Nevertheless, over the course of Legal Accelerators 2.0 we had the opportunity to talk about the possible challenges as well, which tends to be, as we already said, a very good step in overcoming them. A lot of content can fit in both categories, but in a few words the advantages include efficiency, quality, consistency and legal certainty and the challenges mostly pertain to lack of data, data misuse, bias, privacy and security. There were, however, two very thought-provoking challenges that are not so frequently mentioned and would be interesting to explore.
The first one relates to the risk of conservativism as a result of using predictive models. The fear lies in the fact that the software is trained by data reflecting a more conservative era, which is often the only data available at the needed volume, and will therefore, promote more conservative solutions. Moreover, due to the “black box” effect (refers to the phenomenon where the decision-making process of complex AI systems is either not accessible at all or provided in a format that the human brain is unable to comprehend, thus making the “reasoning” behind them obscure), and the “infallible machine” bias (people tend to have absolute trust that machine made decisions must be correct since they are based on maths and statistics and in any case, do you risk not following the AI’s suggestion and later being proven wrong?), these ways will probably not be challenged at all. It is kind of funny, in a bleak way, if you think about it; a vicious circle where progress is bringing forth technology, which in turn will lead us into more conservative ways. This alone can be an argument enough to pursue XAI solutions (explainable AI) in all our future implementations of technology.
The second one, probably less disturbing, is the possibility of legal professionals over-relying on the technology at hand and gradually losing their current skills. Αccording to this concern, we are bound to face a future where human lawyers are lazy, mostly ignorant button-pressers, incapable of understanding even the simplest of laws. This exaggeration was meant to hint that maybe the initial fear towards the de-skilling of legal professionals might come from a silly scenario like this one. As with all other advancements of technology so far, the byproduct of their implementation and the subsequent transposition of ways of living and/or business models is not so much de-skilling but rather a reshaping of required skills. A basic example of this is how the widespread use of the internet, providing global access to knowledge resources, in an instant changes job hiring requirements from a knowledge-based approach to a critical thinking and personal communications one. It is not that people now are de-skilled because they haven’t memorised dozens of books in their mind palace, it is just that the Cloud is a much more spacious area to keep books and you can utilise your “brain-RAM” on other more efficient tasks.
Since this has already developed into a pretty long post, let us conclude by giving you a taste of some interesting presentations that took place over the course of Legal Accelerators 2.0 such as the always fascinating discussion about the most hyped technologies these days: NFTs, the Metaverse and blockchain systems, and the issue of how to approach lawyers with new tech and actually stimulate them.
Also, we are putting a link below to the Legal Accelerators website, for those who are interested in seeking more information and/or contacting the speakers to learn more about the subjects they were most intrigued by.
See you at the next one!
Legal Accelerators:
https://legalaccelerators.com