Good technology can change the routine but important administrative tasks and workflows that law firms face on a daily basis. This may include, for example: The ability of organizations to support remote operations has proven to be essential. Companies that manage their contracts must constantly improve and evolve to ensure continuous support for remote legal operations. Effective contractual cooperation is crucial. In short, the delivery of legal services is changing because needs are changing. More and more non-lawyers are helping the legal industry to adopt a development. To keep up with the speed of a digital world, the legal department must also use the technology that our colleagues in other industries adopted years ago, namely workflow automation. «Eighty-seven percent of the legal departments we surveyed in 2020 expected their total number of full-time internal employees to remain the same or decrease,» says Hutto. «Traditionally, larger workloads could only be managed by higher internal productivity or expensive external advice. Advances in natural language processing and machine learning (ML) technologies are opening up a third way to tackle these critical tasks. AI is changing B2B marketing and enabling companies to optimize their customer experiences. And the legal industry can also use AI to create better customer experiences.

Thanks to these solutions, we have seen a significant change in the way we work. Specifically, legal services have experienced exponential sophistication that has introduced new efficiencies into the production model. We have also seen the development of new tools that increase customer satisfaction and create new business areas. In our own survey, 62% of teams said they already had a Legal Ops feature, up from 33% earlier in 2018. Another 12% already plan to set up the function in their department soon. Change is only accelerating, and with change come new or increased legal needs, and new players have entered the market to meet these needs. Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) have become harbingers of change for the legal industry, prompting in-house teams and law firms to prioritize technology and new ways of delivering services. Workflow automation solutions are becoming increasingly popular, driven by their ability to help business law firms and legal departments increase efficiency, reduce costs, and speed up work. The speed and flexibility of the cloud, automation, and other tools allow law firms to deploy solutions without developer support or long IT wait times. According to Gartner, legal and technology projections for 2022 include the idea that the legal department will automate more than 50% of legal work for large business transactions.

The legal profession, on the other hand, is no stranger to the accusation of being stuck in its paths. Wrongly, we say! Jennifer Mnookin, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and former dean of UCLA Law School, believes that law firms «now think more like businesses than a generation ago.» She goes on to say that much of the work normally done by first- and second-year legal interns is at least partially outsourced due to technological developments. Done right, legal technology can remove existing barriers and have a positive impact on the legal industry. There is no doubt that technology will grow in importance, but technology alone will not save legal practice. The biggest breakthroughs will be made by lawyers who integrate technology with human service to provide their clients with the simplest experience. In addition to customer focus, modern clients are more anxious than ever and want quick answers to questions and concerns from legal teams. Instead of searching the internet, clients are looking for lawyers who are available and willing to answer questions and reassure themselves in the face of the stress of the case. Specialized technology providers have long dominated the legal technology market, with the largest general-purpose enterprise software providers making limited progress in corporate legal services. However, the demand for legal transformation and compliance goes beyond the departments themselves, as CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs recognize the strategic value of law and compliance. Migrating to the cloud has several advantages. For example, lawyers will be able to monitor and manage all their court cases over the Internet, using any mobile device or computer, no matter where they are in the world. In fact, the ABA predicts in its report that over the next three years, 71% of legal departments and 75% of companies will have migrated their data to the cloud and will use the software`s integrated document management services in their internal procedures.

«We are seeing an acceleration in consumer behaviour towards digital. The companies best positioned to succeed in this new reality are those that engage in digitalization and meet customers where they are looking. For some, the most advanced legal technology is exaggerated. According to others, current trends will radically disrupt the profession. What is more than clear is that many legal technology solutions are already making a real difference in the lives of lawyers. Cloud services allow cases to move more efficiently and also encourage collaboration. The relationship between a paralegal and a lawyer requires a lot of back and forth, well, the cloud allows both to work on a case at the same time. You can also save annotations and corrections when designing a document. These are just a few of the examples.

Legal technology is not a silver bullet. And yet, companies that have already integrated legal technology into their operations report increased profitability. To find the most useful trends in legal technology that lawyers need to be aware of, we turned to the best technologists, lawyers, lawyers and consultants. We asked them, «What will be the most important legal technology trend for lawyers and jurists that we will be following in 2022?» Read their answers below to set your law firm up for success in 2022 and beyond. «When [the year] comes to an end, one area for which we have received an increasing number of requests and which I think will be postponed to [the new year] is data collection and reporting that identifies the work done, by whom and how effectively questions such as, `How profitable is this area of practice or this lawyer/paralegal?` Over the past year, law firms have realized that they can do their jobs with less.