The Real Battle for Legal Tech

If you’ve been in legal innovation for as many years as I have, you will see a number of cycles in the market.

Right now we’re seeing an increasing focus on news coverage of tech companies getting funding, which product is the next shiny thing, and how the legal tech battle is centered on consulting firms and the vendors themselves.

What seems to be missing is the comments by and from law firms. In fact, in a conversation recently, I was asked if law firms are “about” legal technology. So it was the right time to write your first blog post after a while to talk about the law firm side and the actual battle over legal technology.

I’m sure law firms are not beyond legal technology. I can see that in what we do and the growth that we see in our own team, but also in other companies. Innovation and Legal Technology are an issue that is getting hotter every day, and as a team supporting our law firm and our clients, we’ve never been this busy. And this focuses equally on what we do internally – on large customer projects or construction work, but also on supporting our customers in their approach to the introduction of technology.

I felt it was time to speak up, talk about what this battle on the mountain of coal actually looks like and bring the law firm’s perspective back into the discussion. The battle for legal tech isn’t about press releases about new tech acquisitions – or really paying close attention to which tech company is buying another or who is investing in what. The battle is how we actually use technology and new ways of working to add value to our work and deliver to our customers, and how we scale them.

It’s about connecting different platforms together in intricate ways to run large projects in a way that works seamlessly (almost hiding the complex discussions and planning that goes into it) and deliver a project in a way that a client can Feeling like they are getting their money’s worth while also making sure it makes financial sense for your own business. A large part of “Legal Technology” consists of gathering, structuring, and fixing data that enables a project to be carried out with technology tools – figuring out which version of terms, loan or contract a loan or contract is based on before You can apply logic and processes; it’s about getting paper documents onto systems so that an AI tool can do its job; The point is to add missing data that must be available to automate the required documents.

It’s about creating products that you can roll out to a range of customers so that you don’t reinvent the wheel every time, but that are also easily customizable to a customer’s specific needs and are easy and efficient to manage.

It’s about helping people who have worked in a certain way for so long to change the way they work. The point is not to underestimate how difficult it is to get someone who is used to printing out a document and changing a manuscript to draft and change it on screen.

It’s about managing the flow of (some, not all) vendors reaching out to every partner in your business about their product and handling the inevitable inquiries that arise when you’re in the middle of a negotiation with another vendor. Or those who are legally involved and reach out to our customers and sell them technology, but fail to help implement and plan how this system will actually work for them.

It’s about getting the leadership of your business to support the decisions and investments that need to be made in this area to make it work.

And while this may sound like a negative post, it really, really isn’t. It’s about flipping the narrative about legal technology. From the systems, the financing, the acquisitions to the way we actually do it and what it means for our customers and our companies. And it really is to reject the notion that law firms are beyond legal tech. We really, really not, we are also very much at a fight.

In the weeks that followed, my senior managers blog about their priorities and their strategy to win the battle for legal technology.

Comments are closed.