Innovation in Law… Why Should You Care?

Get ready for more robot lawyers

Robot lawyers are here. They are few but already among us with the promise of more to come.

Relax. There is nothing to worry about. The ability to harness artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge data-driven technologies is and will continue to be a good thing for all of us in the legal industry.AI forecast: ‘Disruption, then productivity’ | Data Driven InvestorThere is growing concern about all the white-collar jobs that will disappear with the spread of machine learning and…www.datadriveninvestor.com

Yes. We are talking about total disruption. We are talking about what every attorney faces in the near future; one that is already here.

Too many industry professionals consider LegalTech to be nothing more than a buzzword, without appreciation for what it means or what “tech” is involved. That lack of vision not only hurts lawyers, but it harms and holds back the entire profession.

Unfortunately, the law business, while having embraced some small changes along the way, still operates much as it has for 140 years, since before Thomas Edison conjured up the light bulb. When it comes to process, delivery models and outcome assurance, the legal industry has been immune to the same transformational technological changes that have swept over so many other industries as of late, from transportation to finance.

By and large, the stagnation and reluctance in law to leverage technology have been at the expense of not only practitioners but the clients they serve. And historically, every time technology has been introduced to address a problem, it is immediately met with skepticism, mistrust and cross-examination techniques typically reserved for opponents. And enemies.

How can this be, in an industry so reliant on surefire results to justify its existence?

Sit down. I can list a million reasons.

One big reason is that lawyers are slaves to the process.

Just take a look at how the profession operates:

A problem is presented to legal professionals. They pour over information for hours and hours and hours; keeping track of every billable minute. Hopefully, they provide legal interpretations along with solutions. They present their work to the client. Send a bill. And move on.

If a lawyer is lucky, that work product turns into a brief, a contract, perhaps the framework for an actual business deal. Often times, however, the work products disappear into a black hole. Maybe clients implement it; maybe they don’t. Or perhaps that well-researched memorandum is framed and hung on the wall, because that’s all clients can do with it since they can’t figure out an implementation strategy that will actually work for their business.

From the average lawyer’s perspective, when a formula works there is little desire to change it. That’s how law operates ad infinitum.

Another big reason lawyers are loath to adopt technology is an unfounded fear that their beloved billable hours will be lost forever along with their money.

I recall early in my legal career when technology-assisted document review (TAR) was introduced for document analysis and production during litigation. TAR saved resources for law firms and money for clients during the very expensive discovery process. Initially, senior colleagues panicked at the realization that hundreds and hundreds of billable hours were being lost as a result of streamlined procedures in our practice. How will we keep the lights on? How will we keep gas in tank?

As it turned out, TAR is a great thing. We learned that human review is not the gold standard of reliability or accuracy. Reassigning tasks to the technology freed attorneys to do more important work. The technology was reliable, removed human err and, again, saved clients money. Clients love saving money on legal fees because it lets them spend capital on other important things, like paying employees, making strategic investments and almost anything else more worthwhile than flushing money down the discovery toilet.

Happy clients also tend to be loyal clients.

Call it adapting to the times. Call it the invasion of the robot lawyers. Call it smart business. But the trend is indeed catching on. In 2017, we saw $233 million in investments in LegalTech companies across 61 deals. Last year, there was a record-setting $1 billion-plus distributed over more than 40 deals.

Raising this type of capital is a significant milestone for legal technology. However, looking at other industries, like FinTech, which as LawGeex says is “LegalTech’s richer and more successful older brother,” has seen approximately $42 billion invested in 2018. [Sidenote — Dear LawGeex, I dig the “older brother” analogy, but maybe think about how classifying the entire industry as male might make some of the richer older sisters feel left out…Just saying…]

By way of contrast, let’s look at the banking industry and why FinTech is outpacing and out-raising LegalTech. The essential operations of banking have not changed drastically in the last hundred or so years; yet the banking industry has invested heavily in technology assisted processes to make bank tellers, advisers and officers far more capable and efficient. Mobile banking even outsourced some of the banking process to consumers.

What both the banking and financial industries have taught us is that outsourcing low level work or projects to technology solutions and bots did not mean there was not plenty of work still to be done.

There are still plenty of positions and operations to be fulfilled there, the workable hours have just been found elsewhere.

Knocking down the pretension that legal services are only as good as the hundreds of labored hours poured into a matter is a tough step. But it’s a crucial step for the law industry to take if it wants to remain relevant and in charge of its own destiny.

As LegalTech continues to gain momentum, we must also consider what change means to our clients. They are used to billable hours the old way even though they want to know what their service providers are doing on the innovation front in their RFPs. Although new technologies will save them money, it still may be a tough task to convince clients to actually utilize the innovations they are asking for. It’s an even tougher task when that technology hasn’t yet been given a stamp of approval by a judge or regulator.

The responsibility falls on lawyers to find creative applications for new frameworks and platforms. Creativity is often a forgotten skill in law, but when the client is wary of something new that is good for all parties involved, then creativity must be called upon. Practitioners should ask themselves not only how to solve client problems using enhanced technologies, but how to solve them in a way that excites clients about those technologies.

It will take hard work and plenty of time to implement modernity standards. And regulations may be inconvenient at times. But the law industry will be better for it. Not only will we give clients more valuable results, but it may lower legal costs and open up access to legal services for those who could not afford it before.

The law industry is in for a big evolution, that’s for sure. As I said, the robot lawyers are here with more to come.

For example, ROSS Intelligence is a cutting-edge application that taps into AI to curate relevant law research and data based on natural language searches. Cyxtera’s Brainspace uses augmented intelligence and an advanced data analytics platform for investigations, eDiscovery, intelligence mining, and compliance, with many more use cases the company is currently evaluating. Other data analysis methods are being developed at start-ups and law schools around the country.

On my latest Tech onReg podcast, we take a deeper dive on the university R&D process with Daniel Linna Jr., Director of Law and Technology Initiatives at Northwestern University.

“Teaching classes around the problems at the intersection of law, business and technology is the way we like to frame it,” says Linna. “So it’s more than just technology. But thinking about the skills, the people skills, the process skills, the data skills, the technology skills that this next generation of lawyers really need.”

Listen to learn more about where we are headed in innovations in law, technology and robot lawyers.