How will technology change in the future for lawyers?

Jun 12, 2023

Written By Stephen Demery

As with every industry, the legal sector has been transformed immensely in the last 30 years by technology. This significant change begs the question: How will the relationship between technology and lawyers change in the medium-to-long term?

Efficiency and productivity

The most revolutionising aspect of technology in the workplace has been the vast increase in efficiency – making the process of producing work faster, with less effort and expense. Email is a good example of this: before email, lawyers would have to use voicemail or the fax machine to communicate to clients or counsel. Suddenly being able to send written messages instantaneously saved a lot of time, money, and effort which was then freed up and directed to more productive endeavours.

This increase in efficiency is likely to remain the key aspect of how technology will continue to change for lawyers. For example, as commercial law is so team-oriented, new collaboration tools will continue to be adopted and improved, improving efficiency when teams bring together their individual work. Lawyers will be able to streamline and automate an increasing portion of their work as more efficient technology emerges.

Delivery of advice

Technology will also continue to enhance the delivery of legal advice. One emerging trend that is likely to keep growing is transparency – clients are increasingly expecting to know exactly how the work they want done is progressing, and technology facilitates this. Instead of the occasional email in response to an update request, technologies like extranets and dashboards allow lawyers to update clients when certain stages of work are complete. Clients are able to check progress at their leisure.

Retaining legal talent

Another important role of technology in the legal profession will be to enhance the retention of legal talent. Ultimately, it’s younger legal professionals such as paralegals, trainees, and junior associates who undertake the bulk of what’s known as ‘grunt work’ – menial, repetitive, but highly necessary tasks for a deal or piece of litigation to be completed. Examples include bundling, document review and proofreading. It is within this type of work that emerging technologies in the legal world will likely have the most impact as they are more easily automated and streamlined.

What this means for lawyers is that technology will be become a factor in the legal job market – if Firm A has lots of good technology that makes administrative tasks easier, and Firm B has undergone more limited legal tech adoption and has done little to reduce these amount of ‘grunt work’, trainees and paralegals are going to be much more likely to join firm A.

Turnover carries a significant business cost, particularly trainees who have huge sums invested in them by their firms. Thus, legal technology could help to retain and even recruit new lawyers.

Cyber-security and confidentiality

This is another area that lawyers, and especially law firms, will have to be acutely aware of in the future. Law firms hold a lot of highly sensitive information given to them by their clients – they need this information to provide services and solutions to them as part of their relationship. Large law firms who are very active in certain sectors hold enough sensitive information that, if compromised, could have catastrophic results for a number of companies in that sector.

As information becomes both more digitised and shareable through the increased use of intranets and other collaboration platforms, lawyers will need to pay far more attention to their data-sharing practices in order to ensure the integrity of client confidentiality.

Lawyers will become more tech-savvy

Commercial law is a client service industry. If clients are undertaking more technologically advanced work, they need their lawyers to understand these new aspects of their work and the new technological landscape that their business now operates in.

It will likely not be enough for lawyers to simply advise on what the relevant law means for their client – they will have to be familiar with new technologies and the implications they have for their businesses in order to gain and maintain an edge in the legal market.

Will lawyers disappear altogether?

Given the pace of technological change, and headlines quoting business leaders and experts predicting the end of certain professions, some have asked: “Will there be a need for lawyers in the future?”. The answer to this question is almost certainly yes.

Whilst it is true that some of the tasks lawyers perform today will be entirely automated away, this only frees up lawyers to spend time on other matters, and develop an even better client offering. What’s more, there are significant elements of being a lawyer that cannot be substituted with a computer – client service, for example, which has become a highly relevant skill in the modern legal industry. Nor is it easy to imagine a defendant opting for an AI model to represent them in court over a competent barrister.

The impact of technology on the legal sector is much more likely to change the role of the lawyer, rather than wipe them out completely.

Legal Technology