PRESS: 2023 Market Predictions
Sharing here my evaluation of the coming year in the legal innovation ecosystem for Artificial Lawyer, in response to the question:
‘How much will the legal innovation ecosystem have changed – and in what ways – by 2024?’
Read the full piece in 2 parts with the views of a range of experts here.
Jenifer Swallow, legal tech expert and former boss of LawtechUK
The investment landscape will remain difficult for the coming year, so we may see lawtech companies with great offerings taking longer to get to market and/or to customer volume. That said, there has been some decent funding coming in e.g. to later stage lawtechs so we can expect to see pockets of great growth and adoption there as their devs dig in on customer need and they raise their profile with marketing dollars.
The lawtech conferences and conversations with legal businesses this year have demonstrated a broadening of the cohort of lawyers paying attention to tech and innovation and wanting to be part of the evolution – we can expect more pilots, more upskilling, more strategic commitment in 2023 – of course along with a whole raft of continued lethargy. There are also some exciting products coming up to launch and a wave more at the feasibility stage as can be seen in accelerator cohorts and InnovateUK grant applications, so 2023 will also be a gestation phase on many levels.
We know big shifts will come when tech and innovation become a necessity not a nice to have in the minds of budget holders. The economic and wider societal environment over the coming year will be a forcing function to that necessity, with GCs in particular in line for more specific and informed pressure from their CFOs on cost and from their boards on ESG and #failuretoprevent. The incredible growth of lawtech in the regulatory compliance space will continue to track to the latter, with widespread appal at the Post Office Horizon Scandal also seeding into corporate and regulatory consciousness an imperative for higher standards across the board. Lawyers will need to demonstrate – to risk committees, regulators, insurers and societal stakeholders – that they have their arms around both their own legal department, and the governance environment of their employer-clients, using the state of the art to achieve that.
#Ethics will be trending, also influencing expectations and accountability around how technology is used in law as well as how the law is used for tech.
We may also look back on 2023 as the year when the penny drops on the opportunity of smart agreements/smart data and the fact that contracts, if structured correctly up front, can perform and oversee your obligations for you. With the legislation and policy changes in the UK around electronic trade documents and digital assets, and the context-agnostic nature of the technology, there are some exciting opportunities there for the taking. Adoption in this space alone will shake up the legal innovation environment considerably, and increase the availability of business-required data, including for better compliance, economic growth and shared/big data insights.
I remain excited about the consumer and SME space also, for the year ahead, with some tenacious founders going after mass market opportunities that are also tipping points more broadly for the legal sector. Once you have seen what is possible there is no going back and that naturally cross pollinates from consumer legal innovation into business, as we saw with fintech, impacting the ecosystem overall.
You can see my 2022 predictions here
2021 here
And 2020 here