The Rise of the Legal Technology Department

We all knew it was coming. We’ve all seen the developments of moving some in-house legal processes from manual to automated (eDiscovery & Document Review as a great example) in the last couple of decades.

And as expected it’s coming for more departments and creating more innovation without, despite what people think, losing jobs in the economy. In fact it’s not hidden that from 2021 Legal Tech businesses attracted ￡674m in investments which will employ more than 7,000 professionals in the UK market.

Better yet it’s continued growth will lead itself to ￡2.2bn in annual investment and 12,500 jobs by 2026. Crazy right! And we are only at the beginning.

A quote from ‘LawTech UK’ says “Recent data shows the market opportunity for lawtech is ￡22bn annually and that with the right support, lawtech can be a significant contributor to the economy, growing 50% year on year to 2026, on a similar trajectory as UK fintech. The success of the programme to date has laid the foundations for further work to support this growth and transformative innovation, beyond the current market focus on digitising existing practices, which remain expensive, slow and inaccessible, and which result in the current ￡11.4bn in annual unmet legal needs for consumers and small businesses.”

And from our experience we have seen from both our Law Firm (both global and domestic) and Consulting clients that they are pushing the boundaries to embed their own Legal Technology services. Some of you may be curious, what roles & requirements you need for a successful Legal Technology department, and with our own commitment to utilising helpful AI tools, I used OpenAI’s...

...ChatGPT which, unsurprisingly, summed it well:

1. Legal Technologists: with technical expertise in the application of technology to legal practice.

2. Lawyers: with a background in technology: who can provide legal guidance and support to technology initiatives.

3. Project Managers: who can manage and oversee technology projects from inception to completion.

4. IT Professionals: who can provide technical support and maintain technology systems and infrastructure.

5. Data Analysts: who can manage and analyse large amounts of legal data to support decision-making.

6. Business Analysts: who can evaluate the business impact of technology initiatives and identify areas for improvement.

7. User Experience Designers: who can design and implement user-friendly technology solutions.

Of course, this is a simplification above of what is going to be required and this will really vary depending on size of the entity/department, demand internally for usage and also potentially externally based on client requirement as well. But one thing is clear, it’s growing.

You might be wondering what services legal technologies will start to focus on and potentially support. This list is, but not limited to areas such as, practice management, document automation, document storage, billing, accounting and electronic discovery / litigation support.

But we do also need to discuss why law firms (and others) fear legal technology and it’s impact both internally and to the end client.

The biggest one is that the legal industry itself is considered widely conservative and traditional with a centred approach on billable hours and being risk averse to anything which could have dire liable consequences should an issue occur, especially with technology errors potentially having serious financial consequences for the end client.

The other largely discussed topic is the issue around biased information embedding machine learning models such as sentencing decisions and that sometimes each case is not as cut and dry as the information fed. In other terms relating to AI it would be considered 'AI Poisoning'.

But the biggest positive to counteract the concerns seen above is the access to justice for the everyday person. By approaching legal technology with the right mindset, fairness and data input it can improve processes, automate access to further information in the legal field and advice itself, improve user interaction and give people further faith in the legal system.

At TRIA Recruitment we are continuing to provide support for our clients broadening their legal technology capabilities with the above roles and attendance to market leading events such as Legal Innovators, Legal Geek, Relativity Fest across the UK.

Please reach out to me on?[email protected] ?or WhatsApp/Signal me on +44 (0) 7534 178 417 to have a chat.

Disclaimer:?This is all my own opinion & experience and isn't reflective of the views of my current or previous employers.

About Jamie:?10 years’ working in consumer focussed industries via both B2C & B2B environments. My current role is working with a large team and recruiting for some of the world’s largest consultancies, law firms, banks, vendors and SMB’s focusing on eDiscovery, Forensic Data Analytics, Digital Forensics, Big Data, Cyber Security, Tax & Global Trade and finally Competition Economics. Previous to this, I worked with one of England’s Royal Warranted luxury retail businesses.