Adoption of legal technology is increasingly transforming the legal arena. 

In recent years, the legal tech (Legal technology) industry has garnered a lot of attention as digitalization has led to the incredible development in technology. This has tremendously transformed the legal industry, giving the growth of legal tech startups. The advent of legal tech has significantly made legal services easy to use and affordable. Based on business technology and innovation, legal tech is rapidly revolutionizing by the introduction of Artificial Intelligence. Last year, industry experts predicted vital growth in the development of legal tech solutions using AI. And this will continue to deliver new capabilities in 2020 to improve work.

With increasingly growing tech trends, many lawyers or industry advocates are concerned about their jobs that are under threat by the likes of digital technology such as AI, machine learning, natural language processing and others. However, there is not any proof against these threats, instead, such technologies will augment lawyers’ capabilities.

Conventional law firms and practices face quite a big challenge in the market. This also conveys the impact on new-age entrepreneurs. To address this, legal tech startups have begun offering innovative services and attracting top emerging talent.

Massive investment in this field is also enabling legal tech startups to move ahead of innovation. According to the report, investment into UK legal technology startups reached £60.8 million in 2018, up from over double the £22 million invested in the previous 12 months. Jim Leason, Vice President, Customer Markets at Thomson Reuters said, “Legaltech is now attracting funding from a variety of sources, including law firms themselves, private equity and venture capital funds. This interest has given start-ups the crucial leg-up they needed to take their products quickly through to the next stage of development and testing.”

Legal tech startups have the potential to offer something against large, traditional law firms and that is flexibility. This will enable firms to change their employees’ work processes that can help retain talent, fuel employee engagement and ensure a high level of work.

Legal tech startups can also help overcome the issues around transparency and efficiency of a firm’s spending and billing. As recent years have seen major spending in legal services, clients have been more thorough with their billing and spending on legal services, leading to the need of being more transparent and efficient.

There is no wonder that the future of law practices will increasingly rely on advanced technologies and the sessions might be conducted virtually. In fact, the industry will go beyond traditional law practices or courts to some kind of diagnostic system that will guide people regarding their legal options, how to assemble evidence, and provide alternative ways for dispute resolution. On the other side, Gartner predicts that by 2023, virtual legal assistants (VLAs) will field 25 percent of internal requests to legal departments at large enterprises. This will certainly bolster operational capacity for in-house corporate teams.