Is Technology Impacting the Legal Profession?

June 4, 2019 – I welcome John Adams, the latest guest contributor to 21st Century Tech Blog. Adams writes about technology and its impact on lawyers. When he is not writing on this subject he shares insights online on quality of life issues and his own life experiences. The legal profession is not being spared by the resources the Internet puts at our fingertips, nor automation, nor artificial intelligence (AI). But lawyers tend to be fairly conservative about adopting new technology. I even know some who are continuing to use WordPerfect, and old Windows operating systems decades after these products are no longer on the market. Change seems to come hard to them. I hope you enjoy Adams’ contribution and look forward to your comments.

Technology has impacted and reshaped nearly every industry including the law and legal profession. Whether it is time tracking and billing systems, chatbots or contract review, the job of a lawyer has been drastically altered. Today’s lawyers are expected to be tech-savvy, to learn to use different software and technology tools and to make their practice more streamlined and efficient. Today’s lawyers are proficient at spreadsheets, databases, telecommunications, legal research software, and word processing with technology impacting every aspect of the legal field from corporate practice, courtroom operations, document management, and more.

Here are just some of the impacts technology is having on the legal field:

1. Smooth and Effective Client Communications

Telecommunication innovation is enabling lawyers to work from anywhere these days. Lawyers no longer need to be in their office to stay connected to clients, and the documentation associated with cases or issues. Just some of the tools lawyers are using include instant messaging, voicemail, email, and web conferencing.

2. Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing or NLP was probably, after the introduction of word processing, spreadsheets, and time and billing software, the first AI tool that lawyers began to use for doing legal searches in online legal database services like Lexis, Westlaw, and QuickLaw. NLP has since been incorporated into almost any digital application from basic spell checking to Google Search. I recently read a comment that stated: “NLP makes computers think like lawyers so that lawyers can think about the law.”

3. Automated E-discovery

Case preparation involves going through tons of documents to find evidence relevant to a specific client file. Today, almost all documentation can be found in digital form whether contained in emails, databases, on mobile devices, in computer archives, or in IoT devices. The variety for digital forms has made the role of paralegals even more critical as it is their task and their time that is involved in sorting out the case file from these various digital records. For clients, this component of legal costs cannot be underestimated.

Fortunately, there are new tools available to lawyers that go under the name E-discovery which stands for electronic discovery. E-discovery software uses analytics to search for key phrases and words in digital content. Using these software tools helps separate the wheat from the chaff, removing irrelevant documents and information, and streamlining the discovery process. A list of E-discovery software tools can be accessed here.

4. Simplified Case Management

Time can be a lawyer’s worst enemy whether it be court scheduling dates, the assembly of case timelines and date stamping of evidence, and managing billing. That’s where case management software comes in. It can help law firms automate daily and case workflows including viewing tasks, billable time, and calendaring. And case management software makes it convenient for the sharing of a digitized case file with interested third parties when necessary. Whether a lawyer’s practice is in real estate or civil and criminal case law, there are many excellent software tools of this type available today.

5. Cognitive Analytics

One of the biggest challenges lawyers continue to face is the time-consuming routine of legal work. In a recent study, it noted that 31 to 35% of the time spent in practice goes to trying to handle the mountains of data associated with legal search. CEO, Andrew Arruda, of ROSS Intelligence, an analytics tool that works with IBM’s Watson AI, recently stated that “lawyers are drowning in this sea of data that they can’t necessarily use.”

But with IBM’s Watson AI, made famous on the game show, Jeopardy, lawyers can ask questions that then provide relevant legal case results with Watson sifting through billions of documents per second.

LawGeex is another analytics tool that, according to its website, can reduce the cost of contract preparation by as much as 90% while saving 80% of the time a law practice has to give to contract review.

And Kira Systems, another machine learning tool can identify, extract, and analyze the text within contracts and other documents while using 700 built-in models that cover due diligence, lease abstraction, compliance, finance, and more, which according to the company’s CEO, Noah Waisberg, reduces lawyer’s contract review times by 20 to 60%.

To look at other cognitive analytics tools I recommend you check out this site.

6. Online Communities

Last but not least there is the emergence of online expertise in the form of communities allowing for networking and conversation around the law. Communities vary. They can be lawyer-to-lawyer, lawyer-to-client, and lawyer-to-students of the law. A sort of online legal aid, they typically provide resources, chat, and other functions and a Google Search can identify those that are relevant to your local legal requirements.

Even social media sites provide online legal advocacy with many lawyers providing pro bono services to those who pose questions.

A Final Word

Lawyers have been slower to adopt legal practice automation tools than most professionals. The leap from the adoption of personal computers with word processing, to machine learning AI, has been slow. Advising clients, writing briefs, negotiating and appearing in court, to many lawyers, seem to be beyond computerization. But as you can see from this brief review of current technologies available to lawyers, the uptake over the next decade will alter legal practice in a profound way, and change the professional paradigm from the number of hours lawyers work, to billing. In a recent New York Times article citing a McKinsey report, it estimated that 23% of lawyer’s jobs can currently be automated.