The Growing Industry of Legal Technology

The legal technology industry is an interesting space to say the least. In recent years there have been several strides taken towards technological advancement in this space. Various startup companies trying to develop technology and systems to integrate them into the already set practices of the legal industry. The legal industry has remained stagnant and traditional in its practices for a notable while, as the whole premise of the client-attorney procedure is relatively set in stone. However, the legal industry as a whole, including law firms, business practices and day-to-day operations, these new startups and technology can be seen as a turning moment for the whole industry.

Some of the basic level technological advancements in the legal industry include systems to improve and help with accounting, billing, document automation, document storage, electronic discovery, legal research, practice management and case management. The simple functions and tedious work of a law firm has benefited greatly from these. Automating and using technology to carry out the important day-to-day functions makes it possible for less time to be spent on these long tasks, and rather using valuable time to offer to clients. The goal is to create an efficient and easy system to help with the strenuous tasks to focus on actual important roles that every lawyer has to attend to. The top priority is the client and how the case is handled, hence the better the technological advancements are in easing other aspects, the better job a lawyer can perform.

In recent years, the growing technology in the legal industry has exploded, going beyond the basic tasks. There have been numerous start up companies which have systems to track analytics, document drafting start ups, data and contract analysis software, platforms to provide succession planning such as wills, and also things such as digital contracts and digital signing to name a few. All these startups and technology companies point in the same direction, which is to bring technological advancement to the legal space. Even if these ideas and concepts take time to catch on and become mainstream, they are attracting a fair amount of attention early on.

In 2018 alone, there was about $1 Billion invested into these legal technology startups, and the companies offered a variety of new solutions to various legal aspects. These companies ranged from digital signatures, to cloud based contracting platforms. It also included a lot of data and analytics software, some client-relation-management platforms and many more. Although it will definitely take a couple more years for technological advancements to take place in an impacting way in the legal industry, the current circumstances show a positive trend, and the big investments into these early start-ups show that there is definitely a future for this.

We at CounselConnect are in this space to provide client-relation-management, analytics and a connective medium for the lawyers, with other features as well. We strongly believe in the future of legal technology, and are intrigued to say the least where this trends towards.

Fahd Shah
CounselConnect