The Year-End Roundup: Trends in Legal Technology

• Author: John Gillies
• Date: February 02, 2016

The end of one year and the beginning of another is the usual time for commentators to review what happened during the year and discern the trends. What follows is my synthesis of the recent year-end roundups and what they seem to me to say.

Here are the most pertinent articles:

• 2015 LTN Year in Review from Legaltechnews
• Year in Review: Our Top Legal Tech Stories of 2015 from Nextpoint
• Things That Didn’t Happen In 2015 from Above the Law
• The 10 Most Important Legal Technology Developments of 2015 from Robert Ambrogi on LawSites

Among the trends identified are the following:

• The debate as to providing info to law enforcement
• Big data/analytics
• E-discovery: Tech review becomes mainstream
• Data security and encryption
• Web-based services replacing lawyers/AI/Watson/ROSS
• Legal apps for tablets
• The democratization of the law: making case law available for free
• The duty of technology competence

Before reviewing a few of those items in more detail, there is one item that is notable by its absence from that list, namely the impact of technology adoption on the staffing of law firms and law departments. That impact is relentless. Discussions as to the increasing use of tablets and legal apps, for example, and how that fosters increased productivity, dance around the issue of the impact of that improved productivity upon the careers of those who had previously been performing those tasks.

Part of that equation relates quite simply to the ratios of support staff to professional staff in law offices and departments. That is, obviously, not a new trend, as more and more of what had previously been admin tasks are now expected to be performed by the professionals. The other side of that coin, though, is the disappearance of legal professional tasks as a result of improved productivity.

As I noted in my previous posting, Law Firms [Slowly] in Transition, the most recent Altman Weil survey entitled Law Firms in Transition recorded the responses to lawyers in firms and departments as to the effect of LPOs and others on numbers of professionals. The consensus was clearly that those numbers are declining and will continue to do so.

Like the Hound of the Baskerville that didn’t bark, it’s interesting to note that this trend is not highlighted by these commentators.

Back to their analyses, then. The two that seem to me to be front-and-centre relate to Artificial Intelligence and data security.

Speculations as to the effect of IBM’s Watson on the legal field have been...