November, 20208 IN MYV EWBY BABAR HAYAT, HEAD OF TECH AND TRANSFORMATION, KONEXOAfter years of status quo, legal services are undergoing their own digital revolution.Investment in LegalTech globally has increased a staggering 713% since 2018 and well exceeded the $1 billion mark in 2019.This rapid growthcan be attributed to a number of factors - budget, resource and efficiency challenges faced by in-house legal teams and law firms, policymakers opening up the legal services market to Alternative Business Structures (ABS) as well as a prospering technology talent pool, with world-class institutions and pioneering new solutions to increase operational efficiency.This is exemplified by theUK government-fundedresearch program at the University of Oxford to explore the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI)to support legal services. Furthermore, COVID-19 has forced organizations to rapidly adopt new technologies to continue to operate outside of the traditional office environment. Legal technologies having an impactThe legal industry generates a huge amount of data across the typical matter lifecycle. Using a combination of people, process and technology, data sets from disparate systems can be tracked, connected and visualized to fundamentally transform how a team or a business operates. It gives you the means to answer questions such as­what type of matters are taking up the most amount of time? Are these being run efficiently? Where is the volume by region, team, division? In turn, this information can be used to identify opportunities for automation and the types of technologies that can augment the way that lawyers work. One example is the concept of a `Legal Front Door,' which is a structured way for business users to request legal services,typically using a portal.This allows a legal team to capture all the information needed to successfully complete a request and determine where it should be directed. NDA requests, for example, are repeatable, routine types of work that legal teams can get bombarded with. Using the Legal Front Door, a business user can service that request via document automation, completing an online questionnaire relevant to the NDA and automatically generating a signature-ready document.Alternatively, for more complex requests or those that require legal input, the system enables the requests to be sent to the right legal team in the right region with the right skill set to solve it, whether that's in-house legal teams, law firms or an alternative legal service provider.It's a virtuous circle, as the data captured as part of this process can highlight other opportunities for automation or alternative ways of working moving forwards. OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS ON THE LEGAL FRONT DOOR
< Page 7 | Page 9 >