Although the legal profession is more closely associated with tradition than innovation, it’s not immune to the same technological advancements that have affected every other sector. After all, technology is the engine that propels society forward.
Laws schools are adapting to these changes and are trying to prepare their students as well by introducing them to disciplines beyond law, such as business and engineering, sectors where working as a lawyer is extremely lucrative.
To succeed, the lawyers of tomorrow will need to be far more versatile than those of the past. By giving them a chance to learn about other disciplines, schools are also providing them with an environment where they can build networks with people outside the legal profession that will benefit them throughout their careers.
Nowadays, corporate clients are more interested in working with lawyers who have commercial acumen and can help them grow their business. Lawyers are no longer regarded as professionals who can only handle “legal tasks,” legal issues being seen as a business challenge.
International law firms are also adapting to the changes brought about by technological advancements and have established “innovation teams” tasked with exploring new technologies and how they can be used to improve the way they deliver legal services.
And technology has had an impact not only on the way legal services are delivered but also on the amount and nature of the work performed by legal professionals. As technology progresses, it opens up new possibilities to rethink conventional practices and fine-tune processes. For example, advances in communication technology have made it possible to outsource a legal transcriber and have transformed the way lawyers can interact with their clients.
Artificial Intelligence and Legal Research
Thanks to the advent of the internet, the average person has far better access to legal information than in the past.
And the internet has also changed the way lawyers conduct their research. They used to rely mostly on books, while now they can do it through electronic databases. Digitalization is what enabled Harvard Law School to make their U.S. case law archive – which is one of the world’s largest collections of legal materials– accessible to the public. This, in turn, has enabled tech companies to compile and store legal materials, as well as provide statistics based on these materials.
Artificial intelligence has made it possible to create software legal professionals can use to scan legal documents and find relevant casework. According to an estimate from McKinsey, existing technology will be used to automate 23% of the work performed by lawyers.
We can see the potential in how the company ROSS Intelligence used IBM’s Watson to perform legal research. Other companies are working on similar technologies that can interpret legal terminology and perform some of the tasks usually done by legal professionals.
For example, Lex Machina is another company that offers a legal analytical platform based on machine learning and natural language processing. It’s able to analyze and sort through data from millions of pages of litigation, including information about subjects of lawsuits, judges, lawyers, and parties and give lawyers the insight they need to predict the chances of success of multiple legal strategies.