Based on findings from the 2019 Future Ready Lawyer survey published earlier this year, organizations that are already investing in technology are significantly more likely to report higher firm profitability than those organizations that are not adopting technology as quickly. And as Technology Leading firms continue to double down on tech investment — as 65 percent of them indicated in the survey that they intend to do — those firms will become increasingly competitive, widening the gap even further between themselves and lagging organizations.
While these statistics can help to make a business case for legal tech investment, finding the right solution for an organization requires a different kind of conversation — one that is more specific to an organization’s needs. For law firms, there are a number of new types of technology solutions that we expect to see on the rise.
I recently sat down with Jean O’Grady, senior director of information, research & knowledge at DLA Piper US, LLP and author of the acclaimed legal tech website Dewey B. Strategic, to get her take on future technologies that we’re likely to see in the law firm space. Her take: look for increased technology adoption in a few new areas.
“The use of corporate review products like Luminance and Kira has certainly spread,” said Jean. “Analytics products are another area that we’ve seen emerge recently as well. Analytics solutions give lawyers the potential to get insights on trends which may be valuable for litigation strategy. This area has a lot of interest, but I think these solutions pose a challenge for lawyers to understand how to read and interpret the data. The technology is there, but it may be another five years before we have a generation of lawyers who were exposed to these types of solutions in law school and have a strong analytics background to interpret the data and leverage the technology fully.”
Jean also sees the potential for future uses of this technology that integrate different types of analytics to serve new purposes. “In the analytics space, I think there has been a lot of interest around how lawyers can get insights into commonly used clauses — but the next phase could be technology that integrates data around deals with litigation. For example, there could be solutions that examine what deal clauses tend to result in litigation, and those kinds of insights could be very useful to law firms. The next generation of solutions could go further than just identifying trends in data and move into examining long-term outcomes and consequences.”
Source: https://abovethelaw.com/2019/10/the-future-ready-law-firm-a-guide-to-new-technologies/
