Studying legal tech is crucial to your success as a lawyer of the future

The legal industry is changing more than ever.

Modern technology and innovative platforms offer new possibilities for performing legal work and help make processes faster and more efficient and increase profitability. At the same time, customer expectations are also changing, which can be attributed to more demand, complexity and increasing competition. Which ultimately means they are asking more of their lawyers and keeping companies across the board.

As a future attorney, your professional potential is not just based on the academic qualifications or work experience that you can list on a resume. While recruiting agency contacts and relationships can be a bonus, legal service providers need talent who can deliver expertise while adding commercial value. Which in turn is driven by legal tech. Research by the BPP University Law School also shows that modern lawyers need this in the long term. 51% say legal technical skills are what they will need most in the future. To put this in perspective, this was higher than commercial awareness and the ability to manage one’s mental health and wellbeing.

Even from a commercial point of view, HSBC’s Legal Tech Analysis Report from 2019 highlights over 80% of the respondents surveyed that technology was the most strategically important element for their company to remain competitive.

While the weight and relevance of legal technology is revealed by businesses and professionals, it is not necessarily reflected to the extent that it should be reflected by regulators or education providers in the industry. This is an alarming concept as the adoption of new technology has accelerated since COVID and the proliferation of remote working.

Starting in 2021, the UK Solicitors Regulation Authority will introduce a series of new assessments for students wishing to become qualified attorneys – the so-called Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE). While the SQE provides access to a wider range of future trainees and core competencies, there is no mention or further description of legal technology in the curriculum.

This may seem innocuous on paper, but the reach of legal technology is vast. For example, HighQ is a leading technology platform used across the legal profession by law firms such as Addleshaw Goddard, Eversheds Sutherland, Osborne Clarke, Allen & Overy, and others. Knowledge of the platform and other elements of legal engineering gives students a great advantage. In the long run, tools like HighQ will help students project and design technical solutions that can solve real-world problems, as well as understand other legal technologies like big data, automation, and artificial intelligence.

As part of some of their current courses, BPP University Law School launched the HighQ platform to ensure future law students gain valuable experience in applying legal technologies to legal practice. This is similar to what they will experience during their future careers. You are encouraged to use HighQ to solve data collection, visualization and workflow problems in the same way as organizations and potential future employers who already use the platform.

It is crucial that this experience and knowledge, which can be of crucial importance in practice, is not taken into account in the SQE assessments or SQE preparation courses of selected training providers.

From the point of view of a future lawyer, it would also be advisable for future trainees and students to ask how progressive a law firm or chambers are in introducing legal technology. When it offers no value or no efficiency in practice, which is rare at first glance, a lack of innovation or digital ingenuity can be a red flag for future lawyers seeking development with an employer in the modern legal age.

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