Legal World
In the wake of the difficult and evolving landscape of the legal profession, the role of legal innovators is cropping up to drive growth that responds to efficiency, moves forward with accessibility, and maximizes the general provision of justice. These businesspeople, usually a combination of lawyers, technologists, and business strategists, are upset with the status quo and actively on the hunt for and enacting fresh solutions to time-honored questions in law. Through the use of new technologies, re-engineering service delivery models, and establishing a culture of change, legal innovators are the ones bringing about a change in an industry otherwise considered unchangeable, in the end benefiting legal professionals, clients, and society at large.
One of the main tasks of legal innovators is to tend to and demand the use of LegalTech. These include a wide variety of platforms and tools designed to facilitate easier work on a daily basis, streamline workflow, improve research capabilities, and facilitate better communication and collaboration between legal professionals and clients. From sophisticated AI-enabled legal research and contract review programs to cloud-based practice management tools and e-discovery software, LegalTech can potentially multiply many times the productivity and free the administrative tedium under which lawyers are struggling nowadays in an effort to leave them more time to do more high-level and more strategic work. Legal innovators also have a significant role in evaluating the safety and effectiveness of such technology, bringing legal institutions up to speed with implementation, and educating legal experts on how to utilize them ethically, closing the gap between technological potential and implementation.
Moreover, legal innovators are at the forefront of redesigning the delivery models of legal services. They are experimenting and utilizing various structures and modes that can bring legal services within reach, within reach economically, and client-centered. It encompasses expansion in virtual law firms, legal marketplaces online, and subscription legal service plans. In some means of applying technology and diverse business models, legal innovators are attempting to disrupt the traditional billable hour business model and trend towards value pricing and other pre-payment fee arrangements. They also are concerned with improving the client experience through better communication, better understanding of legal processes, and providing self-service facilities and documents. This client-oriented approach is bringing legal services within reach and dynamic to meet the evolving needs of a technologically sophisticated client base.
Another key function of legal innovators is to create an innovation culture in the legal community. This is by instituting a culture of inquiry, experimentation, and adaptability among lawyers. Legal innovators also organize workshops, seminars, and other platforms to make new technology and innovative processes popular. They are also leaders of change in the legal profession and business and making change and facilitating change and making new ideas easier to adopt. Having a lesser self-interest and forward-looking in disposition, legal innovators are bridging across silos and breaking down walls so there is interconnection between technologists, legal professionals, and others. The legal innovators are also taking on more and more leadership of addressing the unavailability of access to justice today.
By leveraging the use of technology and emerging patterns of service provision, they are trying to make the legal services available to small business operators and individuals who would otherwise be excluded from receiving ordinary legal services. Examples of the same include developing web pages of legal aid, constructing computer programs of documents, and legal AI-based chatbots through AI technology to serve answers for straightforward legal questions and provide advice on law. By unleashing the full potential of the technology, legal innovators are trying to make the tools of law accessible and justice within reach to all members of society. Besides that, legal innovators will need to draw the line between regulation and ethics in new technology within practice.
With greater use of increasingly more artificial intelligence, blockchain, and other emerging technologies in practice, serious consideration has to be given to ethics of use, such as issues related to data privacy, algorithmic bias, and upholding attorney-client privilege. Legal innovators also have an important role to play in having such deep debate, establishing ethical guidelines and best practice, and working with regulators so that new technology is introduced into use responsibly and ethically in a manner that maintains the underlying ethics of the legal profession. In effect, legal innovators are taking on a revolutionary role in shaping direction in the legal profession.
By making these calls for adoption of LegalTech, business model innovation, building an innovation culture, closing the access to justice gap, and ensuring ethics and regulation of emerging technology, they are driving a once-conservative industry into the twenty-first century, making it faster, cheaper, and more responsive to a changing world. Their foresight, creativity, and commitment to reform are needed to help secure the legal profession’s ability to adapt and continue to play its valuable role in society well into the information age and beyond.
Read More: Understanding the Importance of Legal tech and AI in Law
