How are law firms changing to meet the challenges posed by tech?
New technological advances bring both threats and opportunities to the legal sector, and have led to a constant pressure to innovate either internally or find the right solution externally. Law firms, too, are responding to the need for innovation by implementing new procedures and introducing various LegalTech Tools to make the work of lawyers more streamlined and efficient, albeit not without any hesitation. While most lawyers and law firms recognise the need to innovate and digitally transform, however, the process of transformation remains very slow in the legal sector in certain regards.
The last 20-25 years have been characterised by waves of changes for the legal industry, with some things changing and others staying the same. Many law firms still hold on to their basic tech-stack that was introduced at the turn of the century, which is holding them back significantly and exposing them to threats. On the positive side, however, changes to the workings of law firms that were imagined two decades ago have now become a reality. It’s now a matter of law firms and lawyers to adopt innovation, and in this sense, innovation in law firms can be seen along three different horizons: 1) Doing current types of work more efficiently; 2) Creating alternative revenue streams; and 3) The model is going to be disrupted. While there has not been the “Uber of law” yet, law firms will have to preempt the drive to a new model, and – as such – really be on the look-out for the model that is going to disrupt the current model radically.
In this episode of The Law of Tech Podcast, I explored the tech-driven transformation of law firms and the role of LegalTech within this context with Jeroen Plink, former CEO at Clifford Chance Applied Solutions and founder at Plink Insights.
Follow The Law of Tech on LinkedIn and Twitter to get behind the scenes and receive episode insights. If you enjoyed the episode, please make sure to share it with your network, and feel free to contact Hadassah Drukarch at thelawoftech@gmail.com for feedback and suggestions for future episodes.