Important Legal Technology Developments in 2014

• Author: John Gillies
• Date: January 30, 2015

Among his many other activities – including practising law – Robert Ambrogi has been writing a blog on legal technology issues, LawSites, since 2002. His posts are always interesting and often very informative. His posting at the end of last year, entitled The 10 Most Important Legal Technology Developments of 2014, particularly caught my attention.

Several developments, such as those relating to legal research, legal hacking, encryption, and searching court dockets, are outside my particular area of interest, knowledge management. Three, however, were of particular interest to me:

• Businesses and technology are changing the nature of law practice
• Human + Machine > Human
• Innovation and disruption become the norm

The changing practice of law

Here, Ambrogi talks about the (failing) attempts in some US jurisdictions to shut down innovative legal companies, such as LegalZoom, on the grounds that they are engaged in the unauthorized practice of law. These providers of online legal information ultimately pose a threat to the commodity services provided by many law firms.

As far as I’m aware, there have not been any comparable challenges here, largely because we have not yet developed Canadian counterparts to those online legal information services. This lack of challenge is likely due to some degree to the control that lawyers have over the delivery of legal services. In August of last year, however, the CBA Legal Futures Initiative released its report Futures: Transforming the Delivery of Legal Services in Canada on alternative business structures (ABSs) and multi-disciplinary practices (MDPs). The report recommends allowing

• ABSs, where lawyers practice in business structures that allow ownership, management, and investment by persons other than lawyers or other regulated professionals
• MDPs
• fee-sharing with non-lawyers

Then, in November the CBA endorsed that report, and advised that the Council will consider adopting these resolutions. Both Malcolm Mercer and Mitch Kowalski have weighed in, here on Slaw, on these issues. If you missed either of those articles the first time around, I encourage you to go back and read them.

Assuming that Ontario, at least, were to follow the lead of England and the UK, while the US continues to dither, we will I am sure see much larger developments under this heading.

Using machines to practise law

In his point entitled Human + Machine > Human, Ambrogi focuses on eDiscovery analysis and notes that 2014 was the year where...