Find out what Legal Tech is
Legal teams and Law Firms are nowadays more and more confronted with an increasingly digitizing business world. The digital transformation changes the way legal advice is delivered. Legal Counsels faces the major challenges to organize a complete digital transition in a very short time frame. Lawyers are looking for tools to manage the ever-increasing mass of digital information and to use it efficiently.
Fortunately, there are more and more Legal Tech solutions emerging which are a useful support to the digitalizing legal services landscape. Keep on reading to find out what Legal Tech is and how it can be an added value to your business.
Definition
Legal Technology, from now on Legal Tech, is software and technology which is used by law firms or legal teams to facilitate their processes and improve their effectiveness. Legal Tech can be called as ‘the driver of the legal industry’ to succeed the process of digital transformation. The aim of Legal Tech is to simplify operations, optimize current workflows and improve the overall management of knowledge and information that exists in law firms or enterprises.
Domains
There are different types of Legal Tech, the most common areas are:
- Accounting
- Billing
- Document automation and storage – document management
- Electronic discovery/ E-discovery
- Legal research
- Practice management
- Case management
On top of these mentioned traditional areas, nowadays Legal Tech also focusses on the next areas to support:
- Cloud-based databases, to make data accessible for other employees across departments
- Data security, to ensure the security of legal records
- Guaranteed GDPR compliant way of working (read more about GDPR here)
- Digitalisation & automation of legal workflows
- Offering platforms that facilitate contract management
- E-Signing tools
- Legal chatbots (Messenger, Chatbox, etc.),to offer users quick answers to basic legal inquiries
As you see, there is a big supply of Legal Tech ready to be discovered. Many of these solutions are based on advanced techniques such as artificial intelligence, which require highly specialized knowledge. There are some Legal Tech providers, such as Knowliah, who already use AI in their Legal Tech software solutions.
Finally, Legal Tech has two different target groups to serve. On the one hand, Legal Tech must meet the legal digital challenges of law firms and on the other hand, it must support the digitization of legal departments. Two different target groups, with slightly different solutions.
