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The Future of Lawyers – Legal Tech, AI, Big Data, and Online Courts


— May 5, 2021

It’s certainly apparent that legal tech, AI, Big Data, and Online Courts are transforming the way one sees and makes use of the legal industry today. 


With each passing day, technology is curating more and more ways to reduce human efforts and make their tasks more efficient. It’s no wonder that technology in the legal sector has also reached new heights, and at this point, it’s more than just automation.

Nowadays, AI has become capable of offering better access to justice to consumers and helping lawyers transform the way they interact with their clients. Additionally, it also removes any scope of human error in the whole process.

As technologies like AI and Big Data continue to mature, people will soon gain access to an unbiased and faster justice system.

In the unprecedented future, law firms might be able to operate without incorporating legal tech and AI, but there are more benefits than downsides to using technology. Here’s a list of stats that show the current progress of these technologies in reshaping the legal industry:

  • According to a report by the Industry Arc, a contract can be reviewed within an hour by incorporating AI that saves 20-90% of the time required by humans, that too without compromising on the accuracy.
  • A survey conducted by Wolters Kluwer reveals that 49% of the law firms are successfully harnessing the capabilities of technology, and 47% plan for adoption of legal tech in their firm.
  • As per a report published by the Information Age, nearly 70% of the consumers prefer using an automated online system for their legal affairs because of speed, cost, and ease of use.

The figures clearly indicate that these technologies will offer better and easier access to justice to the consumers. With that said, let’s take a look at how technology in the legal sector is making the future of lawyers easier:

  1. Analytics Powered by Big Data and AI

Analytics-driven by AI and Big Data are being used in legal software that helps in detecting trends and making predictions using a large and raw dataset. It helps a law firm solve various types of litigation, including property disputes, by predicting outcomes and trends.

Moreover, they can also gain access to a large volume of data related to billing records that act as a baseline to provide suggestions for improvements in efficiency and comparative analysis for both law firms and in-house counsels.

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These analytics can also be used in the judicial duties for predicting the outcome likely to be given by specific judges. It provides recommendations for perquisites of the case and languages preferred by the judge appointed for a particular case.

  1. Interaction with Legal Bots

Online programs designed to offer an interactive experience to a user while assisting or answering their queries as per the situation are known as legal bots. A large number of law firms are using the bots to help their clients deal with their legal issues.

Legal bots are bringing law in the digital age by being helpful for people who don’t have access to any legal resources, like refugees. These bots determine the situation and react accordingly to offer a satisfying experience to the user and help them solve their legal disputes.

  1. Reviews Driven by Technology

Ever since technologies like AI and Big Data in the legal sector appeared, technology-assisted reviews have been in place. They’re used to analyze, search, and organize large volumes of datasets that leads to higher efficiency and reduce document review times by 50 times.

Technology-assisted reviews use a seed set of papers, along with input from users to help a computer recognize relevant documents. Once it’s done, the machine can automatically review numerous documents at once without compromising on the accuracy.

Furthermore, in addition to the individual words, the tech focuses on the intent and the context of the document. As they provide great accuracy and efficiency, a large number of law firms have started using technology-assisted reviews.

  1. Practice Management Assistants

To gain a competitive advantage, law firms are actively partnering with technology tycoons to develop programs that help law practitioners strengthen their individual abilities such as real estate, litigation research, transactions, and so on.

A tool named ROSS is known to be the first robot lawyer that offers analysis and legal research to firms. It can process an unbelievable amount of legal pages every minute. There’s another system named RAVN, developed in the US, to assist people with real-estate disputes.

The Takeaway

After a decade of progress in revolutionary technologies, lawyers and machines might work together in the near future. As technology enables you to solve problems with a unique approach, you’ll realize that both the legal system and a lawyer’s role will be changed with it.

It might be even possible to eradicate the need for courtrooms forever. All in all, it’s certainly apparent that legal tech, AI, Big Data, and Online Courts are transforming the way one sees and makes use of the legal industry today. 

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