Lawyer Monthly Magazine - July 2019 Edition

The Artificial Intelligence Hype: What Do Our Clients Really Expect? Legal Tech, or Law Tech as it is often referred to in the UK, is on the rise: booming global start-up activity is proof that legal professionals and investors alike believe in the imminent technological transformation of the legal landscape. Although FinTech is the sector- specific technology that everyone has heard of, rather than Legal Tech, it must be recognised that a somewhat fragmented ecosystem of legal technology companies has emerged over the last few years across the world, seeking to emulate the success of the Silicon Valley model. The Silicon Vikings, for instance, bridges Nordic and Baltic Innovation with the Silicon Valley, while in Switzerland, the Crypto Valley has emerged as “one of the world’s leading distributed ledger and blockchain ecosystems”. Similar centres can also be found in London, New York and Singapore, as well, as many other jurisdictions around the globe. Increasingly, tech-clusters such as The Silicon Vikings are garnering the attention of key stakeholders such as investors, venture capital, governments - which try to adopt innovation- friendly legislation - as well as the media, who are always drawn to what is seen as the ‘cutting edge’. Such attention has produced a hype that has influenced law firms, independently of the achievements of these start-ups. Further, as a result of building media attention and widely celebrated success stories around the implementation of AI and digitalization in other industries, clients are beginning to develop expectations concerning the adoption of legal tech within law firms, which are sometimes as unrealistic as the claims of some of these start-ups. Historically law firms have never been known as being early adopters of new technologies. However, client demand is the best driver for adoption. In light of this, some of the most tech-savvy market participants have begun to implement new features, actively developing their offering around legal tech. Some of the larger firms are establishing their own “legal labs” to showcase their ability and willingness to invest in the development of digital efficiency. Other medium-sized law firms are narrowing their specializations, focusing on ICOs and blockchain technology. Moreover, some single practitioners are starting purely online law firms that focus on relatively narrow subject areas. Ultimately, larger law firms tend to invest in business-to-business technologies to increase their efficiency and productivity as a firm, while smaller law firms prefer to develop “single- point solutions” that tend to be customer-facing. By Georg C. Umbricht, Managing Partner of UMBRICHT Attorneys, Globalaw 32 Special Feature - Legal Tech JUL 2019 www. lawyer-monthly .com