Legal Tech and Law Tech- Understand the Difference

LegalTech?is a technological solution created for lawyers in law firms, businesses or corporations to help them simplify and automate their own operations..

LawTech?is more disruptive, in that it aims to bring law to small business and people directly by enabling them to self-serve.

legalTech is using technology and software to help lawyers provide legal services more efficiently. This can make lawyers’ lives simpler and easier as it automates repetitive legal processes, dynamically creates documents and offers AI solutions to enable lawyers to see patterns that human brains can’t in order to be more effective in their jobs.

So what’s in it for the client?

If there’s one thing lawyers are known for, it’s their high cost. But the high costs the client needs to pay are not solely for the provision of legal expertise. In fact, in a survey released by Thomas Reuters in 2016 it was shown that administrative tasks take up a third or more of many a lawyer’s day. So a third of all costs are in fact for admin.

Clients are not the only ones who are suffering in this scenario. Lawyers are highly trained professionals and so having to spend so much time on mundane tasks combined with applied pressure to bill for a minimum amount of hours a week, does not do wonders for the motivation.

Solicitors must account for every 6 minutes of their time, which can be pretty stressful particularly when they are asked to bill around ten hours a day (no nine to fives here!) It is no wonder that solicitors have the highest burnout rate compared to any other profession in the UK. 32% of UK lawyer job seekers are applying for non-legal roles — up from 24% in 2007. More than a staggering 90% of junior lawyers say they feel stressed and under pressure at work, with more than a quarter describing stress levels as ‘severe’ or ‘extreme’.

What is LawTech?

As for the real wave of change in the legal market, that is when LawTech comes into play. LawTech is more about helping businesses and consumers self-serve. The idea is for individuals to have a DIY legal product or legal service where individuals are empowered and enabled with the knowledge (which human lawyers would normally do), and they can actually get that from a machine instead.

Therefore, the distinction is that the technology of these LawTech businesses would for the first time get rid of the expensive administrative work, which they would be able to do themselves instead of relying on human lawyers by using automated processes which would enable businesses to avoid expensive administrative work.

Once the distinction between LegalTech and LawTech has been clarified. There are two main camps of varying opinion when it comes to this legal technology discussion.

On the one side you have lawyers who would rather halt this technology as they believe that this will eradicate their jobs and on the other end, there is the opinion that yes software will displace tasks of lawyers but rather than being fearful of this, it is an opportunity for lawyers to use their education for much more meaningful work instead.

So, although speculation is made as to this hindering the job prospects for future lawyers, this would for the first time since the dawn of time create the ability for lawyers to reinvent themselves and make the practice of law more efficient and less expensive, whilst giving them more time to fully apply their mind and produce the best results.

However, it cannot go unnoticed that these two terms although headed in the right direction are still in their infancy.

For law firms to have enough money to adopt such technologies, for lawyers to change their traditional mindset and adopt this new approach, and for clients themselves to also trust online platforms instead of human interaction will all take time to emerge in the industry.

Hybrid for the future?

Thus a quick solution, for the time being, would be to create a hybrid of both, so that LawTech and LegalTech can coexist with one another and both lawyers and consumers can continue working together in a more efficient and cost-effective manner.

The aim is to enhance innovation, and in both fields the driver is technology. This hybrid would therefore try allow for consumers to use this technology that LawTech provides, like?DocuSign, to do the tasks which are administrative in nature, enabling lawyers to be truly innovative in their use of their time much like in-house lawyers.

This would inevitably mean a ditching of the traditional billable hour model. As such, lawyers would be able to make use of LegalTech in all of its functions, whilst also implementing LawTech to give aspects of law to the consumers hands, giving back the ‘real’ legal work to lawyers to focus on producing efficient results.