The Impact of Technology on Legal Industry

By Apac CIO Outlook | Thursday, December 19, 2019

The legal profession, which was slow in embracing technology, is now willing to invest in this ceding business to yield benefits from the new model legal providers that meld technology, business and legal expertise together

Fremont, CA: With industry awash with technology is hovering all around the world, the need for 'legal tech' has also soared up in the legal sector. The investment in the legal tech has marked an all-time high record with a shoot of 713 percent in 2018. Legal tech accelerators and incubators are opening around the globe. This automatic rise in the investment in the legal sector is because of the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence by the in-house community, which strives to extract more value from lawyers.

Technology has impacted almost all the sector of our lives and businesses. The legal profession, which was slow in embracing technology, is now willing to invest in this ceding business to yield benefits from the new model legal providers that meld technology, business, and legal expertise together.

A Myth with Legal-tech

There is a common myth attached to the technology that it will 'disrupt' the legal industry. But that's not true. Technology acts as a catalyst for legal delivery transformation and foundational elements for new delivery models. In fact, the new delivery models that are agile, customer-centric, leverage data, melds tech with human resources to optimize performance can do it. Technology-led to shift in a paradigm of legal delivery from brute force labor to automation and value maximization of resources. With technology, the law is no longer solely about lawyers, as the cross-disciplinary collaboration of the digital age has washed the side effects of legal hubris, practice rules, and anti-competitive regulation. Technology has democratized the delivery of legal services, making it open for all. Earlier, the lawyers had the monopoly as sole providers of legal assistance and legal source materials.

Legal Globalism and Collaborative Culture

Law is one such thing that keeps changing from place to place and has been made according to provincial needs. Lawyers always created a practice territory and kept non-lawyers out of that. Technology has erased those territorial boundaries and made the profession geographically agnostic, making it accessible for those legal consumers who are dealing globally. The emerging global tech community is reshaping the culture, composition, contours, skillsets, and the priorities of the legal industry. Though there remains a difference in the practice of the profession, the application of technology in the legal sector is a global phenomenon, which remains constant than geographical distinct.The technology-enabled new legal culture, which is transparent, customer-centric, diverse, collaborative, cross-border, data-driven, and innovative, is replacing the present legal system, which is fragmented, labor-intensive, risk, and mostly dominated by lawyers.