Technology in the legal sector has had a great impact in recent years, since it has rethought business models, forms of delivery and, above all, the relationship with clients, so that the profile of the current lawyer and his or her training needs to face the day to day must go hand in hand with technology. LegalTech is understood as technology that serves to better manage business models that offer legal services.
The industrialization of the legal profession is based on the generation of automatic processes, on the use of data to generate patterns and finally on the ability to be predictive. These new models are born from the innovation brought hand in hand with technology in what has been called LegalTech, which is a more profound change than digital transformation because it impacts the model and nature of providing legal services. LegalTech is a key element in the competitiveness of any model because it is directly linked to efficiency and the provision of a better service to clients.
In this industrialized legal profession, we are seeing the emergence of models that give away legal documents or offer them at a low price, that file claims in an automated way, that assist from cell phones or that advise on whether or not you should sign a confidentiality clause in seconds. Surprising? Well, we are only at the beginning of this revolution that will be marked by virtual assistants and the empowerment of buyers of legal services. Now more than ever, the client is king. And this is the focus for survival: putting the client at the center, understanding them and improving their accessibility to legal services.
We are fully entering the era of recommendation and if international legal directories such as Chambers or Legal 500 are a benchmark in this regard, we are already seeing models of lawyer recommendation based on the analysis of judgments, i.e., on statistical data of results. Searching for a lawyer is becoming easier and easier through digital search platforms, which at the same time offer two or more quotes quickly and easily. The legal sector is in full effervescence.
Technology is impacting the sector in five areas, knowledge management, processes, service delivery, communication with clients and of course, new areas of law generating a self-consumption of models that can be standardized, an empowerment of the buyer, new forms of communication based on the digital environment, predictive capacity and lower costs.
However, the traditional legal profession will continue to have its market based on sector specialization, optimization and efficiency with the use of LegalTech in the aforementioned areas, but it will be reserved for complex and unique problems. Industrialized law is creating new users of legal services which implies a greater legal culture in society, a greater wealth and variety of models and an evolution.
Lic. Génesis Moyeda Salazar.
Gloria Ponce de León & Hernández
