Legal Tech provides improved legal services revolutionizing the legal industry.

Businesses across the globe nowadays are facing unprecedented levels of changes, as advancements in emerging technologies continue to rise. These changes are also affecting the way legal firms perform. With the rise of new technologies such as AI and blockchain, there is a general consensus that technologies can make a big variance en route to legal functions work.

The first kinds of legal technology were electronic records systems, but the term has come to refer to the start-up drove the digital transformation of certain aspects of the legal services industry. Legal tech is the use of technology and innovations to eke out the time from legal services. Other legal tech includes e-filing, e-discovery, state-of-the-art technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence.

In some ways, the legal services industry has been practicing technology for some time, in others, they are exploring how the technology might be utilized and which of the many products easy to get to on the market that is best associated with their requirements.

Despite this appreciation, the legal industry is slow to adopt new technologies. The reason behind this slow pace of adoption is that law firms make money based on billable hours. But a number of things have led to an increase in popularity for legal tech, including the upsurge in in-house counsel hiring, an enormous increase in reviewable documents, among others.

ABA Call for Lawyers

To be competitive in the market, the American Bar Association’s (ABA) call for lawyers to abreast of germane legal technological advances and increased competition for clients. At a recent ABA conference, experts say, courts, clients are pushing for greater use of legal tech in daily interactions.

According to the experts, lawyers’ lack of fundamental understanding of new legal technologies will soon put them at a disadvantage if they don’t change their ways. Spoke on a panel last week at the ABA’s National Conference on Professional Responsibility in Vancouver, Canada, they stressed that legal tech is only becoming more pervasive in the practice of law and lawyers must catch up.

Game Changing Technologies

The speakers at the conference also pointed out that technology has been game-changing for lawyers over time. One of the experts and the President and CEO of LawPRO in Toronto, Daniel E Pinnington says, e-discovery, for instance, has completely transformed work. He points out that years ago, attorneys were sifting through paper files but now e-discovery tools do the job using artificial intelligence to search texts and find relevant documents.

Many experts believe that if lawyers can’t accept promising technologies on their own, outside entities will make them. A blockchain platform can be utilized as another technology that might be benefited to the legal sector. Towards the digital transformation of the legal industry, the technology could make significant changes as it can be distributed, but not copied, through cryptography to generate permanent records over time.

According to a lawyer in residence and data protection officer at CLIO in New York, Joshua Lenon, Blockchain is being used or will soon be used for smart contracts, CLE tracking apps, and law firm trust fund trackers. He further added that lawyers should get acquainted with it because blockchain evidence is admissible in three states.

Legal Tech Rakes in Huge Investments as Lawyers Tardily Embrace Automation

There are a range of issues befell last year in front of businesses, including the case of Facebook user data leaks to the downfall of the global stock, and several others. But for the legal tech, the year was very successful and set a new investment record in the industry.

Investment into legal technology platforms has touched a record $1 billion last year, as investors move their head to transform the last bastion of a manual process, the lawyers’ work. The record $1 billion investment is distributed across more than 40 deals, compared to $233 million investment across 61 deals in 2017.

In January this year, the companies focused on Legal tech reportedly bagged $106 million in VC (venture capital) funding round. That includes San Francisco-based Ironclad’s $23 million in Series B and Texas-based Disco’s $83 million in Series E funding round.

This was not the first time the legal tech companies lured the attention of investors to their company and services. Over the past few years, investors have become more interested in Legal tech companies. And with these massive investments, it seems that investors will invest more funds and will only continue to increase in 2019 and beyond.

In a nutshell, LegalTech will accelerate the evolution of the legal industry and its entities in years to come. It has already started to do so, as more sections of the legal profession are automated. Indeed, while corporations are looking around to in-house counsel, consumers, on the other hand, are looking to self-service digital legal kiosks. As a result, law firms are building up themselves with AI-assisted insights.