PRESS: Firms ‘must harness technology’
Definitely not Robocop, but great to contribute to this Times article about lawtech as one of the obvious fundamentals of legal service for business and society over the next 5+ years.
An 'apostle of the new religion' only where religion is accelerated evolution.
Firms ‘must harness technology’
Thursday July 14 2022, 12.01am, The Times
It may sound of interest only to the geeks in the OCP conglomerate’s office in the film RoboCop — but nearly £675 million has been poured into “lawtech” in the UK over the past two years.
A report from TheCityUK, a group that lobbies for Square Mile interests, published this month pointed out that the UK investment was just a fraction of the worldwide lawtech market, which is valued at about £13.4 billion.
The researchers estimate that UK backing for lawtech will rise to £2.2 billion within four years, a prediction that is based on average annual growth that has more than doubled between 2017 and 2020. In the tech world, law is easily outpacing other fields, with “fintech” investment rising by 20 per cent over the same period, and “healthtech” by 47 per cent.
“The UK has become a global hub for lawtech,” the authors of the report by TheCityUK said. They explained that “it benefits from a highly developed legal market, a technology talent pipeline, a competitive tax system, and a liberal regulatory regime”.
What the UK had over competitors, the report said, was the Legal Services Act 2007, which ditched rules that prevented non-lawyers from joining law firm partnerships. Perhaps more important, that legislation allowed for outside investment in law firms.
Beyond a catchy term, though, what is lawtech? Richard Susskind, a solicitor turned legal profession futurist, explained that there were four branches.
Back-office systems for accounting, word processing and email are the most obvious. Next are systems for document automation and template databases, which collate a legal practice’s knowledge and expertise. A third area involves client communication systems that enable firms to communicate digitally with clients, for instance, through online dealrooms or video links.
At the high end of this spec is arguably the most controversial area — online legal services, which include the delivery of legal services without the direct involvement of lawyers.
Yet, for all the talk and money being spent on lawtech, the UK legal profession is hardly at RoboCop levels of wizardry yet. Susskind estimated that more than 90 per cent of lawtech expenditure by law firms was still in the back office — “although there is much talk about technology changing the delivery of legal services, we are still at the foothills,” he said.
A slightly separate but linked area is lawtech in the courts, where it is either about the computerisation of historically paper-based administration or — more ambitiously — online dispute resolution. The government’s court modernisation programme, which is scheduled for completion next year, is expected to deliver efficiencies rather than wholesale transformation.
The public is also cautious of lawtech in the courts. A report from the Social Market Foundation said its researchers found “considerable support for or acquiescence towards greater digitisation and automation”, but there was “much less support among the public” for the use of artificial intelligence in the courts, “especially in sensitive areas such as decision-making”.
The apostles of the new religion remain undeterred, however. “The biggest lawtech opportunity is societal,” said Jenifer Swallow, the former director of LawTechUK, a government-backed programme that aims to modernise the country’s legal services.
Swallow argued that access to legal services was “expensive, complicated and slow, and lawtech can have a big impact here”. She pointed to figures showing that about 75 per cent of the growth in lawtech over the past three years had related to consumers and small business. Swallow said: “That is exciting — particularly when you think of how consumer fintech products changed the landscape in financial services.” She predicted that within five years lawtech products would be “helping people DIY their legal issues and get support on demand, at an affordable price”.
Lawtech is not just for consumers and businesses that have struggled to afford legal advice in the past, its proponents have said.
Swallow pointed to a more than 200 per cent rise over the past three years in products catering for regulatory compliance for large corporations. “When you think about the challenges of operating in the modern business environment with the volume of laws and regulations and environmental, social and governance responsibilities to navigate,” Swallow said, “it simply won’t be possible to stay on top of risk without harnessing tech. The lawyers and companies that get this right — and who embrace structured data as part of that — will have a competitive advantage.”
And there are acolytes on the ground. Nick West, chief strategy officer at the law firm Mishcon de Reya, described himself as “very pro-lawtech”.
West said that the UK legal profession “has not just been slow to change, but missed out on a huge wave of digitisation, automation and standardisation that most industries — particularly consumer ones — went through in the early 2000s”.
West acknowledged, however, that “many participants in the wider legal market are cynical, apathetic and in some cases actively change-resistant”.
Ultimately, lawtech proponents will be hoping the RoboCop mantra from pre-digital 1987 — “they’ll fix you; they fix everything” — will come good for the legal profession.
Read full article by Jonathan Ames at the Times website here