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Here comes Law 3.0

RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers

Published: October 5, 2018

What if your law practice were an AI-driven robot that got everything right? Sure.

Why isn’t it? What’s in the way? What resists that? Why you do, of course.

According to some far seers in the biz, the coming “Law 3.0” wave envisions a legal field where the technology, business practices and restrictions on law practice make up a seamless, repeatable, and completely scalable web.

And most have you haven’t gotten to “Law 2.0” yet, have you? I bet some of you still have typewriters, don’t you?

Most law firms can’t or don’t scale anything, because they run on the individual needs of individual partners, who design systems in accord with what they need, rather than having a vision of how the whole enterprise could interact for everyone’s benefit.

But the increased mechanization of the law business means that all system processes are going to have to integrated, not just with the needs of a few, but the needs of the office, restrictions of the practice like ethical considerations, the cloud, the courts, clients, security, privacy, and everything in-between.

It all needs to work together, or clients will be flying out the door to firms that can do the tech dance.

In addition, every piece of data in a law office will need to be reactive to e-discovery and GDPR-like privacy rules. This means that, eventually (and sooner rather than later), all data searches are going to have to be responsive to a fairly limited set of platforms. Setting this up properly essentially means that a lot of pre-discovery tasks are already automated, so that discovery requests can be dealt with more efficiently.

And efficiency is going to be the hallmark of Law 3.0.

Clients will know which firms get it and which don’t. It is no exaggeration to say that most clients—commercial or individual—are ahead of most law firms technologically. The next wave of legal tech will need to reflect that fact by eliminating duplicative processes, or anything else that slows response time, as clients look for efficiency, flexibility, and speed.

So relax. It’s time for the technologists to take over, make everything look and work the same, and finally be friends with legal tech. Cause it is taking over, and it is calling the shots, whether you want it to or not.


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