Law is one of the last bastions of anti-innovation and must learn to confront digital efficiency
Members of the legal profession have an unfortunate reputation. On-screen depictions of lawyers give us a sense of society’s perception towards them; from the impossibly stern Julius Hoffman in Netflix’s Trial of the Chicago 7, to Judge Rinder’s performative reality TV court cases, lawyers in popular culture get a bad rap. A reason why the law is so often maligned is that it’s accused of being archaic – a modern pillar of society that continues to live in the past. This is true. But there is no reason why it can’t change.
As sectors across the world digitise, from banking to healthcare, education to the global supply chain, the legal industry is one of the last bastions of anti-innovation. According to The Thomson Reuters’ State of the UK Legal Market 2021 report, 74 per cent of senior UK partners believe there should be more investment in legal tech. For such a significant and affluent sector, new technologies apparently seem in short supply.
It would be easy to attribute this to the antiquated nature of the sector. Unsurprisingly, an industry where senior figures wear 17th century wigs and are referred to as “Your Honour” is likely to lag a bit behind. But, on closer scrutiny, what you find is that there are specific legal mechanisms that disincentive digital efficiency.
The first is the age-old concept of the fixed hourly rate. With most UK law firms charging by the hour, very little premium is attached to efficiency and speed. Digital tools are about saving time and labour, which is incompatible with the industry’s current business model. Software that automates simple tasks will mean lawyers are forced to charge less.
The second hurdle to digitisation is the esoteric nature of legal knowhow. With a lot of information still in Latin, you know you’re behind the curb when the Catholic Church has modernised its lexicon before you have.
It’s not just the language that is inaccessible; legal knowledge is purposefully understandable to lawyers alone. It is in lawyers’ best interests to restrict the layman’s understanding of complex legal issues, because without this information barrier their expert advice would be less valuable. Legal tech solutions democratise access to information. If content is made readily available, and documents become easier to understand, this negates the need to spend unnecessary money on lawyers.
It goes without saying that an increase in legal tech solutions will save UK businesses – from startups to scaleups to multinationals – a tremendous amount of money. According to the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), small businesses in the UK lose up to £13.6 billion every year due to their failure to take care of legal matters. The same report found that SMEs on average dealt with eight legal issues a year, and 43 per cent of these resulted in costs of over £5,000. Valuable time is being wasted due to the unchallenged inefficiencies of lawyers, and it’s British businesses that are paying the cost.
Not only will the digitisation of the legal sector vastly benefit entrepreneurs and business leaders, but it will also empower lawyers themselves. This is not the archetypal case of technology automating people’s jobs. It is actually far from it. Legal tech will provide lawyers with more time to do what they love: practice the challenging and intriguingly complex side of the law.
Digital tools will never replace the human ability to work out complicated aspects of legal practice, the parts that require flair, lateral thinking, and soft skills. Lawyers should see digitisation as an improvement of their toolkit, a set of instruments which will allow them to do their job even better. Technology is not something they should fear. We won’t be seeing a cyborg in Judge Rinder’s courtroom chair just yet.