Legal Industry : Trends and Embracing AI Co-Pilot Technology

The UK legal sector is experiencing a period of significant transformation. Client expectations are evolving, new service providers & technologies are emerging, regulatory requirements are increasing and there’s a challenging talent shortfall.

In this article, I'm going to explore how technology will address these trends as we continue into 2024. Let's consider the following:

Client Experience: Clients are demanding greater transparency, online collaboration tools, faster turnaround times and cost-predictability for case and project management.

Operational Efficiency: Practice managers and partners are increasingly seeking to reduce costs through improved automation and increased team productivity.

Client Acquisition: Law firms are becoming increasingly professional in their marketing to secure new business opportunities.

Globalisation: As firms seek to expand services into new territories, there is an increasing demand for expert local knowledge and cross border collaboration.

Cybersecurity: An increasing number of high-profile cyber security incidences continue to weigh heavily on legal sector managers.

Regulatory Compliance: Obligations under new legislation are driving the need for increase compliance reporting and enforcement.

Partnerships: Law firms are increasingly focusing on specific legal practice areas and collaborating with specialist Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) to offer deeper expertise in specific area of the law.

Staff Retention: Creating engaging workplace experiences and automating repetitive, tedious tasks whilst providing staff the flexibility to work from any location on the device of their choice.

Naturally, law firms are increasingly turning to technology to help address these challenges. Here are some examples of how digital transformation and process automation are helping:

Practice Management

These systems typically incorporate functionality to automate and optimise practice workflows, including:

• Marketing and New Client Acquisition

• Client Onboarding

• Case & Document Management

• Time Recording

• Client Billing

• Customer Collaboration Portal

LexisNexis & Thompson Reuters are the traditional suppliers to large corporate law firms with over 250 staff.

Peppermint Technology, Access Group and Advances Business Software Solutions (ABSS) provide services to mid-size UK law firms with between 50 and 250 staff members.

Popular, relatively new, providers include Clio, Leap and Osprey Approach typically provide services to smaller UK solicitors with under 50 staff but are continuing to challenge more established providers like Access Group and ABSS.  

Opus 2 Lex is the most popular practice management system for barrister’s chambers.

Practice management platforms typically integrate with external finance systems for accounting purposes include Xero & Quickbooks

Document Processing

Generative AI technologies are helping to optimise the review and generation of legal documents. Large language models (LLMs) are trained on publicly available and internal private datasets to automate contract drafting and reviews by:

• Summarising key clauses and points made

• Cross referencing to data sources including emails and notes for consistency

• Ratify and highlight monetary and date parameters

• Highlighting omissions, conflicting clauses and inconsistencies

• Identify key risks and suggest mitigations based on legal citations

These technologies are designed to assist and increase productivity of legal professionals.

Legal Research

Legal databases and online resources provide lawyers with quick and comprehensive access to vast amounts of case law, statutes, regulations, and legal scholarship. This eliminates the need for time-consuming manual searches through physical libraries. However, the large volume of data means the research process is often slow and laborious. Fortunately, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming legal research. Tools powered by LLMs can now analyse legal documents and identify relevant case law, to provide citations and guidance based on a user's query, saving significant research time.

Popular legal research platforms include: Lexology.com, Thompson Reuters Westlaw, LexisNexis and Law.com

eDiscovery

These systems are designed to scan large datasets including:

• Document File Shares, Network Drives and Cloud Storage Systems

• Email Systems

• Collaboration Tools including Chat Threads and Meeting Transcripts

• Personal Computer and Mobile Devices

• Social Media Platforms

• Enterprise Applications & Databases

Typically, eDiscovery systems will surface content and metadata information relevant to a specific case and organise the information as required typically as a timeline, information authors and collaborators or logical units of related information by project, customer, employee etc.

Relativity uses comprehensive AI capabilities to get better, faster insights and dramatically reduce the manual effort associated with eDiscovery reviews.

Everlaw is a legal eDiscovery technology company that provides a platform for document analysis to law firms. It is a cloud-based litigation platform enables teams to discover, reveal, and act on information to drive internal investigations and positively impact the outcome of the litigation.

Specialist & Emerging Legal Service Providers

There are a number specialist offerings designed to accelerate legal service delivery from companies such as:

InfoTrack provide digital conveyancing technology changes the way law firms access and utilise data from a range of sources including Land Registry, Companies House and HMRC.

Legatics is a legal transaction project management system designed to optimised and automated legal processes such as mergers and acquisitions.

There are also a number of emerging AI powered technologies design to increase legal staff productivity, including:

Definely and LawY act as legal assistants, trained by lawyers, which can assist legal professionals with tasks such as: conducting legal research, drafting letters and documents, creating precedent orders, preparing court documents, reviewing case law or legislation, proof reading and summarising information

AORA uses cognitive AI to codify legal and tax legislation, guidance and policy to deliver resource-intensive analysis conclusively in seconds, producing thoroughly referenced, compliant documentation

Avail is a title document review platform powered by artificial intelligence. Driven by a team of lawyers and data scientists, Avail is powerful, easy to use tool for real estate lawyers in England, Scotland and Wales.

Employee Experience

The way legal firms locate, onboard and retain staff is evolving. Resource managers need to adopt strategies for both permanent and contract associates who specialize is specific areas of the law. In a competitive market for great talent, law firms to be flexible and seen as easy to work with. There are a number of key components to a successful talent management strategy. These include:

Talent Management Systems – these provide easy to use, online processes for resource managers to streamline the staff recruitment, management and onboarding process. Timesheet & absence tracking should be integrated to payroll to ensure ensure permanent and contract staff are correctly renumerated.

Modern Workplace Technology – these are cloud-based services which enable employers to offer staff a flexible working environment using their preferred choice of device (mobile or laptop running Microsoft, Apple or Google operating systems) in any location (office, home or on the move). Universal Endpoint Management (UEM) system enable new/lost or stolen devices to be sent directly to end users and automatically have their data and applications built/restored from the cloud without delay because the IT department do not need to be involved. Finally, modern biometric technologies enable users to login into their devices securely without having to remember and constantly change complex passwords.

Productivity Tools provide standardised, intuitive online business processes and collaboration tools, to increase staff efficiency. For example, easy to use tools to expedite meetings, messaging, voice and video communications, document co-authoring and task management all increase individual and team productivity.

Process Automation capabilities reduce staff's administrative burden with AI assisted business processes acceleration. Example may include: scheduling meetings, generating meeting transcripts and summary notes, generating marketing and sales collateral reduce staff admin overheads.

Staff Engagement - focusing on staff retention with engaging, personalised work experiences such as: ensuring job satisfaction using role definitions, objective setting, personal development & training, mentoring & feedback cycles, providing personalised knowledge management including access to relevant public and corporate documentation, articles, social media posts & personalised news feeds relating to customers and projects that the employee has a specific interest in.

Microsoft are the dominant supplier for modern workplace, productivity & collaboration tools via their Microsoft 365 and Teams application suites. The relatively new Microsoft Viva suite has been developed to delivery a rich set of staff engagement tools.

Governance

Practice managers are increasingly required to oversee their Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) activities including:

• Publish and maintain corporate security policies

• Guard against cyber security threats

• Enforce security policies including zero trust & single sign on (SSO) systems access

• Maintain Data Leak Prevention (DLP) Controls

• Report on compliance tracking for ISO, Cyber, GDPR regulations

• Produce departmental KPI dashboards

• Conduct regular vendor reviews

• Demonstrate cost control by monitoring software license usage

Microsoft are also the most popular supplier device, user, data and applications security & compliance through their Endpoint Manager, Entra identity, Defender security and Purview compliance offerings many of which are built into their standard M365 business and enterprise licenses.

Conclusion

With such a wide range of technology options available, practice managers and partners will benefit from a consultation with an experienced strategic technology advisor. However, legal firms typically cannot justify a full time CIO/CTO on a six-figure salary. If this is the case in your firm, why not explore the option of working with a fractional CIO/CTO. These are part time, C-suite technologist who can provide strategic advice and guidance for a fraction of the costs of a full time equivalent. For more information, visit www.digitalselection.co.uk or book a no-obligation 30 min introductory call here