Legal Technology is Revolutionizing the Field of Law: Maybe a Work-Life Balance is Possible After All?

Dylan Sawyer, Former Intern-2021

Picture yourself as Harvey Specter¹.

Your day begins bright and early, guzzling coffee due to the lack of sleep you got the night before. Your first task of the morning is to help one of your clients acquire a company they want to absorb. Then you are charged with sifting through piles of discovery for a breach of contract suit. After that, you bring action against a company for stealing one of your clients' technology ideas. Finally, you appear in court to handle Mike Ross’s criminal case for practicing law without a license². As your night comes to an end, you pound a few glasses of whiskey to take the edge off. 

Your job would be a lot easier with technology to help streamline all of these processes.

Over the past four weeks, I have conducted an extensive market research project to evaluate the legal technology landscape. This evaluation includes: the present use of prevalent technologies, alternative legal approaches, the future of artificial intelligence in the legal profession, and how Arizona and Utah are blazing a trail to elevate the legal industry³.

Finding 1 - The “Four Main Buckets”

There are four main buckets of legal technology software that are the most widely used and helpful platforms on the market. The buckets are: Time and Billing Software, eDiscovery, Contract Lifecycle Management, and Practice Management Software.

Bucket 1 - Time and Billing Software⁴

This software enables firms to bill their clients more efficiently by ensuring no billable hours are left behind due to time-keeping errors. They also give clients easy access to payments by providing a variety of payment methods. Some features include time tracking, invoice templates, mobile payments, recurring payments, and time summaries.

Bucket 2 - eDiscovery Software⁵

The goal of this software category is to make it easier to sift through the immense amount of documents made available during discovery. It accomplishes this by providing deposition transcripts, email threading, identifying potentially privileged information, and keyword search.⁶

Bucket 3 - Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)⁷

This type of software aims to automate the creation and maintenance of contracts, reducing the amount of time it takes to create and revise contracts. These software features consist of contract templates, keyword searches, e-signatures, deadline alerts, and annotations. 

Bucket 4 - Practice Management Software ⁸

These systems help expedite administrative work for lawyers and paralegals by automating workflows, providing client portals for transparency and communication, offering document templates. They also provide features like matter organization, client intake forms, and automated calendaring.⁹

These buckets are the tip of the iceberg in integrating AI to automate processes that save time on mundane tasks. It will be interesting to see if the trends continue for firms to adopt more technology.

Finding 2 - Alternative Legal Approaches

Aside from technology, a trend that emerged from my research is the concept of alternative legal approaches. These approaches provide legal services that are cheaper and more efficient than traditional legal methods. They include fractionalized legal services, DIY legal help, and litigation financing. 

Fractionalized Legal Services 

Companies offering these services provide a medium to connect lawyers to companies and individuals in need of legal services. For example, Auxana charges independent attorneys a monthly membership to be put into a database from which various companies can search through. 

DIY Legal Help 

These types of companies help guide individuals and small businesses in a far more hands-off approach. They provide documents, step-by-step guides, and legal consultations to help guide you through more basic legal processes. Companies that provide these services include LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer

Litigation Financing 

Companies help firms and companies pay for the price of litigation and collect interest on the money that they lend out. Legalist is a unique example of a financing company that chooses which cases to take based on their AI technology that provides the likelihood of success for any given case.

Overall, the DIY services seem to be the most beneficial to the consumer because of the affordability. The fractionalized approaches are economical as well, but lack some of the expertise that is required in certain legal matters.

Finding 3 - Looking Ahead: Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Law Firms

As technology becomes more ingrained in our society, the legal industry can no longer turn its back using the minimal amount required. In recent years, AI has already begun to integrate into various legal matters. For example, law bots are AIs that can assist people in basic legal matters by answering a series of questions regarding an issue.¹⁰

DoNotPay is a law bot that can help people fight parking tickets, write demands for neighborly disputes, and help get refunds on delayed or canceled airline flights. In total, DoNotPay can generate over 1,000 legal documents and has helped save people over $30 million from parking tickets in major cities across the US and Europe.¹¹ Other examples of law bots include LISA, which assists people in creating NDAs, and Freewill, an AI that can create wills.¹²

In addition to law bots, virtual law firms are becoming increasingly popular, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These remote-style firms can cut back on overhead costs, enable enhanced mobility, and have a wider client reach.¹³ Many suggest that most small to medium-sized law firms will continue in this virtual format, even after the pandemic is over. 

Finding 4 - The Future: Arizona and Utah

Down in the Southwest (some may refer to as still being the “wild west”), new legislation passed in Arizona and Utah can drastically change the legal scene in the United States.¹⁴

Arizona has paved the way for the creation of legal paraprofessionals and alternative business structures (ABS) (15). Legal paraprofessionals are nonlawyers who are allowed to have an economic interest in their firms. These paraprofessionals can provide legal services, without lawyer supervision, in the following four fields: family law, limited jurisdiction civil (state court), limited jurisdiction criminal (misdemeanor crimes), and administrative law.

Utah has created a pilot program, similar to Arizona’s, in which nonlawyers can provide certain legal services.¹⁶ As of now, 28 companies are a part of this pilot program. Their services range from medical debt advice,  real estate transactions, and divorce processes. Due to the wide range of services these companies can now provide, Utah is a step ahead of Arizona in this regard. These bills allow for cheaper, more accessible legal assistance, and if successful, many other states are assumed to follow suit. 

Arizona and Utah are setting themselves up to be leaders within the legal industry and blazing the trail to encourage innovation. If successful, it is only a matter of time until other states jump on the bandwagon. 

In conclusion, with the legal industry being one of the oldest, most established professions, change is sometimes more challenging to enact. However, with the steady uptick of legal technology companies, the market has shown that the demand is there, and the industry is ripe for innovation and advancement. All signs point to the notion that this market will continue to grow and blossom into something novel.

No more long hours and sleepless nights for attorneys; Harvey Specter can be a well-rested attorney! 

The legal industry in the United States is long overdue for a makeover, and blood is in the water, but only time will tell how law in America will reinvent itself.

References

1. Harvey Specter is a fictitious character from the TV show Suits, which details the lives of lawyers working in a corporate law firm

2. Suits needs to be more realistic, no lawyer handles all of those practice areas in a day!

3. These main buckets were found primarily using websites like the ABA buyers guide and Capterrra. These sites provide insights into the legal technology and these four areas appeared to be the most overarching. “Buyer's Guide - ABA Legal Technology Buyers Guide.” Go to ABA Legal Technology Buyers Guide, buyersguide.americanbar.org/. “I Just Used Capterra to Find Software!” Top Software at Capterra | Software & Software Reviews For Business & Nonprofit, www.capterra.com/. 

4. Examples of time and billing software include: LawPay, TimeSolv, and Time59.

5. Examples of eDiscovery platforms are Everlaw, Logikcull, and Lexbe

6. In a study conducted by the American Bar Association (ABA), it was found that 59% of lawyers used some form of eDiscovery More information on the study done by the ABA can be found here: “ABA TechReport 2020.” American Bar Association, www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice/publications/techreport/2020/. 

7. Examples of CLM are Ironclad, Cobblestone, and ContractWorks

8. Examples of practice management softwares are Clio, PracticePanther, and MyCase

9. According to the same study done by the ABA, 52% of lawyers had access to practice management software.

10. Additional information on law bots can be found at the website cited here: Your Document Builder in the Cloud, autom.io/blog/5-lawyer-bots-you-can-try-now. 

11. “Save Time and Money with DoNotPay!” DoNotPay, donotpay.com/. 

12. “Write Your Legal Will Online, Free & Simple.” FreeWill, www.freewill.com/. 

13. More information on virtual law firms can be found in the article in the ABA Journal, cited here: Braff, Danielle. “Thanks to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Law Firms Are Starting to Embrace Virtual Offices-but Will It Last?” ABA Journal, www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/thanks-to-the-covid-19-pandemic-law-firms-are-starting-to-embrace-virtual-officesbut-will-it-last. 

14. The UK, head and shoulders above the US in this domain, passed a similar bill to these in 2007, called the Legal Services Act. This act establishes just six areas of law that are required to be handled by attorneys: appearance in court, litigation, probates, property, notarial activities, and oaths. 

15. “Licensing & Regulation.” Arizona Judicial Branch > Licensing & Regulation > www.azcourts.gov/Licensing-Regulation/Legal-Paraprofessional-Program. 

16. https://www.utcourts.gov/resources/rules/urap/docs/15.pdf