Legal technology has evolved in the past few years; however, after the COVID-19 pandemic, law firms have adopted several new trends. Some law firms are lawyers who were good with tech, while others had a hard time working remotely and depending on different tools to get the work done. COVID pushed the people involved in the legal profession to evolve and innovate as per the need of time. Firms closed their offices for an unannounced time, and they couldn’t access their paper-based documents. As a result, the justice system shifted to virtual proceedings in no time.
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Here are some legal technology trends that have made the fastest technological shift possible for everyone involved in the legal profession.
Virtual Conference Technology
Video calls were not something new when the COVID pandemic hit. However, after law firms and their staff were forced to work from home, tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and other video conferencing applications received more attention than they ever did.
In addition to that, meetings allowed law firms to take their proceedings online while higher trials were done using Zoom. Across the globe, courts shifted to virtual hearing software, and from the looks of it, this trend is going to outlast the coronavirus pandemic.
Digitization of Documents
While law firms and their legal proceedings went entirely remote, documentation followed their lead. Firms were quick to spend huge sums of money last year to digitize all the documentation and get rid of paper-based documentation.
Automation
Today, law firms and lawyers are assessing their document management systems. Most international and national firms are now using various products in several jurisdictions while maintaining stability among different platforms. Big organizations are focused on finding tools that are jurisdiction agnostic and operate in several other languages. Automation is vital in streamlining legal operation, including document management, contract generation, legal research, and compliance tracking. By leveraging automation technologies, such as robotic process automation (RPA) and workflow management systems, legal operations can improve efficiency, reduce manual errors, and free up valuable time for lawyers to focus on higher-value tasks, ultimately enhancing overall legal service delivery.
Cybersecurity
Before the pandemic, cybersecurity remained one of the concerns of law firms; however, after the global corona outbreak, lawyers moved to remote working, and now they are forced to pay close attention to what role they can play to fight cyberattackers.
We can say that law firms are quite late to jump on the bandwagon but moving to the cloud has become one of the best decisions of most law firms. Better internet connectivity and increased bandwidth coupled with COVID’s role to push people to work remotely has transformed how law firms used to work. However, on-premise and alternative servers can still be hacked.
Data Analysis
There was a global emergency to digitized everything during the COVID-19 pandemic, and people realized that there are plenty of benefits apart from having easy access to the data to digitize everything that in-house legal departments and firms across the globe could enjoy. E-discovery appeared to be the main focus of most lawyers for investing in legal tech; meanwhile, we can also see new technologies coming out every day that are helping law firms and in-house legal departments to gain important insights from their data. Data analysis is an easy way to consume a high amount of data to make the right decisions assessing risk tolerance.