The Legal Tech Revolution: How Innovation is Empowering Your Law Firm
Brian Packer
Transformation Director | Fractional & Interim CIO/CTO | Digital Transformation | Cyber Security | Infrastructure Modernization | CRM/ERP Optimization | DevOps | FinOps | M&A Due Diligence, Integration & Value Creation
The UK legal sector is experiencing a period of significant transformation. Client expectations are evolving, new service providers & technologies are emerging, regulatory requirements are increasing and there’s a challenging talent shortfall.
In this article, I'm going to explore how technology will address these trends as we continue into 2024. Let's consider the following:
Client Experience:?Clients are demanding greater transparency, online collaboration tools, faster turnaround times and cost-predictability for case and project management.
Operational Efficiency:?Practice managers and partners are increasingly seeking to reduce costs through improved automation and increased team productivity.
Client Acquisition: Law firms are becoming increasingly professional in their marketing to secure new business opportunities.
Cybersecurity:?An increasing number of high-profile cyber security incidences continue to weigh heavily on legal sector managers.
Regulatory Compliance:?Obligations under new legislation are driving the need for increase compliance reporting and enforcement.
Partnerships:?Law firms are increasingly focusing on specific legal practice areas and collaborating with specialist Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) to offer deeper expertise in specific area of the law.
Staff Retention:?Creating engaging workplace experiences and automating repetitive, tedious tasks whilst providing staff the flexibility to work from any location on the device of their choice.
Naturally, law firms are increasingly turning to technology to help address these challenges. Here are some examples of how digital transformation and process automation are helping:
Practice Management
These systems typically incorporate functionality to automate and optimise practice workflows, including:
Modernising these applications via digital transformation programs to move away from legacy, on-premise systems in favour of cloud-native SaaS offerings design from the ground up to have flexible workflows, extensible data schemas and customisable, well designed user interfaces remains a key challenge for legal business leaders.
Major software providers in this space include:
LexisNexis & Thompson Reuters ?are the traditional suppliers to large corporate law firms with over 250 staff.
Peppermint Technology , Access Group ?and ?Advances Business Software Solutions ?(ABSS) provide services to mid-size UK law firms with between 50 and 250 staff members.
Popular, relatively new, providers include Clio , Leap ?and Osprey Approach ?typically provide services to smaller UK solicitors with under 50 staff but are continuing to challenge more established providers like Access Group and ABSS. ?
Opus 2 Lex ?is the most popular practice management system for barrister’s chambers.
Process Automation
Generative AI technologies are helping to optimise the review and generation of legal documents. Large language models (LLMs) can be trained on publicly available and internal private datasets to automate various legal processes. Key to implementing the new AI technologies is good data governance. LLMs need to be trained on the highest quality, most recent structured and unstructured datasets to deliver value to the business. Once your data has been correctly prepared, the models can be trained and AI tools can provide a tremendous boost to productivity in the following areas:
?Contract Management
Legal Research
Tools powered by LLMs can now analyse legal documents and identify relevant case law, to provide citations and guidance based on a user's query, saving significant research time.
Popular legal research platforms include: Lexology.com , Thompson Reuters Westlaw, LexisNexis and Law.com
eDiscovery
These systems are designed to scan large datasets including:
Typically, eDiscovery systems will surface content and metadata information relevant to a specific case and organise the information as required, typically as a timeline, collating information by authors and collaborators or logical units of related information such as projects, customers and/or employees etc.
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Relativity and Everlaw ?are example technology companies that provide eDiscovery services to law firms.
Specialist & Emerging Legal Service Providers
There are a number specialist offerings designed to accelerate legal service delivery from companies such as:
InfoTrack ?provide digital conveyancing technology changes the way law firms access and utilise data from a range of sources including Land Registry, Companies House and HMRC.
Legatics ?is a legal transaction project management system designed to optimised and automated legal processes such as mergers and acquisitions.
There are also a number of emerging AI powered technologies design to increase legal staff productivity, including:
Definely ?and LawY ?act as legal assistants, trained by lawyers, which can assist legal professionals with tasks such as: conducting legal research, drafting letters and documents, creating precedent orders, preparing court documents, reviewing case law or legislation, proof reading and summarising information
AORA ?uses cognitive AI to codify legal and tax legislation, guidance and policy to deliver resource-intensive analysis conclusively in seconds, producing thoroughly referenced, compliant documentation
Avail ?is a title document review platform powered by artificial intelligence. Driven by a team of lawyers and data scientists, Avail is powerful, easy to use tool for real estate lawyers in England, Scotland and Wales.
Employee Engagement
The way legal firms locate, onboard and retain staff is evolving. Resource managers need to adopt strategies for both permanent and contract. In a competitive market, law firms to be flexible and easy to work with. There are a number of key components to a successful talent management strategy.
Talent Management Systems – these provide easy to use, online processes for resource managers to streamline the staff recruitment, management and onboarding process. Timesheet & absence tracking should be integrated to payroll to ensure staff are correctly renumerated.
Modern Workplace Technology – cloud-based services which enable employers to offer staff a flexible working environment using their preferred choice of device (mobile or laptop running Microsoft, Apple or Google operating systems) in any location (office, home or on the move).
Productivity Tools provide standardised, intuitive online business processes and collaboration tools, to increase staff efficiency. For example, easy to use tools to expedite meetings, messaging, voice and video communications, document co-authoring and task management all increase individual and team productivity.
Process Automation capabilities reduce staff's administrative burden with AI assisted business processes acceleration. Example may include: scheduling meetings, generating meeting transcripts and summary notes, generating marketing and sales collateral reduce staff admin overheads.
Staff Engagement - focusing on staff retention with engaging, personalised work experiences such as: ensuring job satisfaction using role definitions, objective setting, personal development & training, mentoring & feedback cycles, providing personalised knowledge management including access to relevant public and corporate documentation, articles, social media posts & personalised news feeds relating to customers and projects that the employee has a specific interest in.
Microsoft are the dominant supplier for modern workplace, productivity & collaboration tools via their Microsoft 365 and Teams application suites. Microsoft Viva suite has been developed to deliver a rich set of staff engagement tools.
Security, Compliance & Governance
Practice managers are increasingly required to oversee their Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) activities including:?
Data compliance tools will scan data repositories and automatically label documents containing personal information. Further, these tools will enforce data protection policies to guard against deliberate and inadvertent data loss.
Modern biometric passkey technologies enable users to login into their devices and applications securely without having to remember and constantly change complex passwords.
Universal Endpoint Management (UEM) systems ensure:
With UEM, replacement devices are sent directly to end users and automatically have their data and applications restored from the cloud without the IT department being involved accelerating the whole process.
Again, Microsoft are a popular choice for security & compliance products through their Endpoint Manager, Entra identity, Defender security and Purview compliance offerings many of which are built into their standard M365 business and enterprise licenses.