This Arizona transplant froze earlier this month in NYC but over all I believe things are heating up between technology and legal. It’s been a year since the Reinvent Law event in NYC and the number of legal tech companies has grown rapidly. A February 4th 2015 Evolve Law event at Cardozo Law School addressed an important question: Why are attorneys somewhat resistant to change, particularly technology?
A recent article, “Four Areas of Legal Ripe for Disruption by Smart Startups” by Bob Goodman and Josh Harder of Bessemer Ventures, identified the most promising types of legal tech companies. There are indeed hundreds of legal startups popping up all over the US and Europe. However, adoption of technology in the legal field is still slow.
Why do attorneys struggle with adoption of technology?
A simplistic answer is that nobody wants to be replaced by technology and most people do not like change. As someone who led a finance department at a law firm and now sells into the legal field, I can say that attorneys want automation to be easy (not so different than other busy professionals).
Consumers will not mind creating an account on a platform to solve a particular problem, but lawyers are challenged to log in to multiple systems.
Our panel at Evolve Law discussed the need for integration between systems. With the hundreds of legal tech startups in the fields identified by Bessemer and the majority of these companies using cloud technology, we have created a disjointed attorney user experience.
Legal tech or tech in legal
My opinion is that we should be providing technology for the legal field and supporting the existing processes with our platforms. Attorneys are not yet ready to replace processes or practices outside of e-discovery and practice management systems.
Original article on Forbes.com » http://www.forbes.com/sites/maryjuetten/2015/02/19/legal-tech-or-tech-legal/