Technology is a catalyst that is driving change in several industries. In the legal sector as well, technology is facilitating several positive changes. The legal sector has long been resistant to and risk-averse about technology adoption, but COVID-19 challenges forced the sector to embrace technology and explore its benefits.
As per a recent Gartner report, legal departments will increase their legal technology spend by three times by 2025.
This means technology will take center stage in the legal sector in 2021 and beyond to support workflows and meet productivity demands. The following trends will be the most prominent:
Increased Adoption of Artificial Intelligence for legal research
One of the biggest disruptions of Artificial Intelligence in the legal sector will be in the field of legal research. The legal system is vast and constantly being updated; with the help of AI, those associated with the legal sector can get useful insights into the legal domain within seconds.
Recently, ROSS Intelligence has started using IBM’s Watson. Watson has Natural Language Understanding, which allows it to quickly comprehend and analyze structured and unstructured information in legal documents. ROSS Intelligence is using Watson to understand and interpret the complex legal terminology to look up case law and statutes.
Increased focus on automation
Drafting of documents is an integral part of legal offices’ day-to-day work. Automated document-writing software makes this task simple, helping legal firms save a lot of time. Post-pandemic, the demand for corporate transaction work is at an all-time high. This increase in workload can only be met with the help of automation. Machine learning and natural language processing offer a new way of handling several important tasks, such as – data collection, reporting daily tasks, and billing.
Gartner survey predicts that by 2024 legal firms will have automated 50% of their work.
But to achieve success with the help of automation, it is crucial that specific issues are identified that can be solved with the help of automation.
Increased adoption of transcription technology
Post-pandemic, several legal proceedings are being conducted remotely through videoconferencing. Every single nuance and every tiny detail is important and crucial to the case’s verdict in such meetings. Legal transcription technology powered by AI can transcribe all the testimonies, hearing schedules with timestamps, jury instructions, legal case briefs, deposition, courtroom summary, agreement matter, meeting minutes, and e-contract and legal deed documents – enabling fast data processing and organized record management.
Increased adoption of chatbots
Although the pandemic has stalled several aspects of our lives, the need for legal assistance has not ceased. As a response to the pandemic, the trend has now shifted to remote legal consultation. Chatbots in legal services, also known as – virtual paralegals, are helping clients to get answers to their most common questions.
For example, Billy Bot is a junior clerk robot who is programmed to help you find the right legal help for your legal problems.
They cannot replace human lawyers but are certainly helping the legal firms increase the operational capacity and save a lot of time.
Increased focus on cybersecurity
The legal sector is a popular sector for cyber attacks. As more and more legal firms migrate to the cloud, it presents a significant risk to clients and their assets and the legal firms’ reputation as well.
Therefore, there will be a heavy focus on keeping the information and property of the clients safe and setting policies to prevent cyber attacks.
Wrap Up
One might think of technology as disruptive, but ultimately, it’s the technology that has helped the world function even during challenging times. Now that the world is getting used to the new normal, it’s clear that the firms that embrace the latest technology trends are certainly going to have a greater competitive advantage over the firms that are resisting an already irreversible change.
