We expect four key factors to shape the future of legal technology: improved customer experience, ubiquity of technology, advanced AI capabilities, and a revolution in knowledge management. Going forward, we plan to invest more in our LegalTech experimentation offering to actively engage with these drivers, research and evaluate new technologies, integrate them into practice, and ultimately improve our clients` experience and engagement with us. Corporate lawyers who do not properly plan their technology investments risk wasting money on ill-adapted and poorly adopted systems. The hype of tech marketing leads to high expectations and ambitious deadlines that can rarely be met. “New Law” is a collective term in the industry that became popular after the global financial crisis. It is often associated with “Legal Tech”, “Legal Ops”, “ALSP” and “Legal Innovation”. Everyone is generally seen quietly, not as part of a larger process of change. This begs the question: has the new law led to changes that affect legal consumers and society as a whole? That`s what matters. Many of these changes relate to legal technology tools.

Every day we see a new tool that we can use to improve ourselves as lawyers. That`s why 60% of law firms plan to increase their investment in new technology between 2021 and 2023, according to the results of the Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Lawyer Survey 2021. The goal is to take full advantage of innovative tools that can help us reduce margins of error and improve the accuracy and timeliness of lawyers. In addition, most legal departments do not plan well for such initiatives. A common mistake is to follow a legal technology roadmap without sufficiently considering the needs of businesses or end users. Typically, companies that look at how a technology improves certain business functions or business outcomes perform better than companies that don`t. Case in point: A recent survey of law firms found that about one-third (30%) of law firms have someone dedicated to responsible for law firm innovation. Interestingly, the largest law firms were more than twice as likely to report that their firm had an employee responsible for innovation.

At IE Law School, we are fortunate to have an international committee of experienced Legal Tech consultants. This committee is made up of industry experts from different parts of the world, such as Roland Vogl, Executive Director of CodeX – The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics (responsible for compiling this list). According to Gartner, there is currently a gap in legal departments between professionals who are familiar with legal issues and internal processes and those who understand the technology needed to make these workflows more efficient. It is necessary for the consultant to fill this gap, which can be achieved by building and defining hybrid profiles. “For lawyers who regularly work in contact with courts and other government agencies, you should keep an eye out for digital interface providers, both with lawyers and with the public. Right now, there`s a fairly small pool of providers doing this, and COVID-19 has pushed many courts into online worlds they didn`t think they`d be forced to do, testing many systems (e.g., online jobless claims) for stress. We could really use more competition in this area, greater adoption of open source technology, and more knowledge about purchasing decisions (such as data ownership) by governments. “Normalization is anathema to most lawyers because it undermines the myths of legal exceptionalism and tailor-made legal work. These fictions have perpetuated the old business model of legal delivery. Other industries see standardization as a way to share capital costs, reduce time to market, simplify processes, create consistent quality standards, and share data. They use economies of scale and create effective synergies through targeted cooperation and collaboration with like-minded companies. That is the path the new law will take.

(See www.dlex.org). We can see an increasing number of investments, but we have to understand that the key to the success of these investments is first to determine what is the problem that needs to be solved. We need to look beyond legal technology trends and learn about solutions that have really worked in the industry to make informed decisions. The new legislation will strengthen the industry through horizontal and vertical integration, joint ventures, managed services and other collaborative mechanisms. Large law firms such as Dentons, DLA, and others are growing through horizontal and, less frequently, vertical integration. Large legal departments are beginning to explore integration that leverages infrastructure, shares data, pools expertise, shares risk, reduces the cost of legal services, and meets growing cost reduction goals. Drawing on the benefits of using technology coupled with good, old-fashioned legal expertise, ABA says, “These tools perform consistent search, modification, and analysis that allow lawyers to reduce manual work and, in turn, focus on their clients` more advanced and nuanced legal needs that technology can`t fulfill.” “Eighty-seven per cent of the legal departments we surveyed in 2020 expect their total number of full-time internal employees to remain the same or decrease,” says Hutto. “Traditionally, larger workloads could only be managed through increased internal productivity or expensive external advice. Advances in natural language processing and machine learning (ML) technologies offer a third way to address these critical challenges. On December 17, I had the honor of hosting a conference on legal technology trends at the Legal Management Forum. It is the most important event of the Spanish legal tech industry and serves as a reference on the international scene.

It is organized by the Wolters Kluwer Foundation, Inkietos and Santander Bank and annually analyses trends in the legal sector. IE Law School has participated in the past as an academic member of the Forum, and this year we had the pleasure of hosting the event on our new vertical campus in the IE Tower. In previous editions, we`ve learned about the legal tech ecosystems of Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Italy, the United States, India, and Australia. The legal industry will be more like its corporate clients and society as a whole. It will be more holistically diverse – cognitive, demographic, cultural and experiential. The workforce will be more creative, technical and data-driven, empathetic and collaborative. A diverse, team-driven, client-centric and integrated workforce is united by a common goal: to provide accessible, affordable, on-demand, scalable, data-sharing legal products and services that help solve challenges and seize opportunities at the pace of business and society. The legal department will be integrated internally and will collaborate cross-functionally with other divisions as well as across industries. Both events looked at the latest trends in the legal sector as well as lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic. These events coincide with a historic moment we are witnessing in the industry: the opportunity to streamline business through technology, with all the growing ethical and safety risks that automation brings.

Another overlapping issue that was analyzed at both events was how business-led internal services accelerate the delivery of legal services. New demands and the accelerated pace of change are forcing companies to adapt in order to compete in a market where there are more and more suppliers, where it is difficult to retain talent and where customer demands are greater. Despite the hype surrounding the field, automation is not a leap of faith. Even in 2019, the average legal department reported that 33% of their corporate transaction work was automated. There`s room for more: In the same survey, legal departments said 55% of their work on corporate transactions was automatable. Gartner`s research highlights the impact of technology innovation on organizations` legal and compliance goals. In particular, it examines the positive and direct impact of legal technology on companies` legal productivity and efficiency, its potential to increase compliance risk and complexity, and its transformative role in the legal value chain. The key to success is first identifying specific problems that can be solved with automation, rather than using legal technology in search of a problem. Large legal consumers should require their law firms to share their relevant data with and with other lawyers on the rosters, subject to confidentiality considerations. A law firm`s data is an essential and untapped part of its expertise and must therefore be made available to clients.

This can be addressed in the engagement letter. General statements regarding data privacy by potential suppliers should be carefully reviewed by legitimate buyers before retaining a company.