Six Transformative Technology Trends Impacting the Legal Profession — from americanbar.org
Summary
- Law firm leaders should evaluate their legal technology and decide if they are truly helping legal work or causing a disconnect between human and AI contributions.
- 75% of firms now rely on cloud platforms for everything from document storage to client collaboration.
- The rise of virtual law firms and remote work is reshaping the profession’s culture. Hybrid and remote-first models, supported by cloud and collaboration tools, are growing.
Are we truly innovating, or just rearranging the furniture? That’s the question every law firm leader should be asking as the legal technology landscape shifts beneath our feet. There are many different thoughts and opinions on how the legal technology landscape will evolve in the coming years, particularly regarding the pace of generative AI-driven changes and the magnitude of these changes.
To try to answer the question posed above, we looked at six recently published technology trends reports from influential entities in the legal technology arena: the American Bar Association, Clio, Wolters Kluwer, Lexis Nexis, Thomson Reuters, and NetDocuments.
When we compared these reports, we found them to be remarkably consistent. While the level of detail on some topics varied across the reports, they identified six trends that are reshaping the very core of legal practice. These trends are summarized in the following paragraphs.
- Generative AI and AI-Assisted Drafting …
- Cloud-Based Practice Management…
- Cybersecurity and Data Privacy…
- Flat Fee and Alternative Billing Models…
- Legal Analytics and Data-Driven Decision Making…
- Virtual Law Firms and Remote Work…