The legal field may have a reputation as being somewhat resistant to technology, but one of the unintended consequences of the pandemic has been the push it’s given the field to embrace technology. The issue has been forced so how will law firms operate now and into the future?
Prof Michael Mainelli, executive chairman of Z/Yen Group, believes that Covid has affected and will affect the profession in three distinct ways. First, how the sector has been pushed to adopt new technologies and ways of working. “Law firms have been slow to adopt technology, not because they’re stupid – they’re extremely bright people – but because it’s not particularly in their interests to be efficient the way the system is structured.”
He says that is often the case with commercial law, where the more time they spend on something the better they do. “So they have typically resisted technology, but they have no choice in the way they work.” In addition, their clients have increasingly adopted technology so there’s much more pressure on firms to do so also.
A second, perhaps unforeseen, consequence of Covid – and one that is only likely to continue – is increased access to the law, particularly for those in developing nations. “In developed nations, we tend to forget that approximately 4.5 billion people are excluded from proper access to the law and 1.5 billion have a criminal or civil problem they just can’t solve.
“There’s a lot of injustice around, and technology can go some way to helping, and we’ve seen this in a whole variety of countries as we look around the world. You can see countries where people are doing automated case management, such as business law, employment law and divorce law are done automatically in certain countries, where there are online divorce platforms for example.”
We already have large auction houses having platforms in cyberspace where they auction non-fungible tokens
The third way that Mainelli sees the profession changing is somewhat “more futuristic”. Will we be seeing law firms advertising in cyberspace?
“While that seems fanciful, we already have large auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s having platforms in cyberspace where they auction non-fungible tokens (NFTs). We can imagine lawyers joining this online persistent virtual world.”
When speaking about the future of the legal industry and whether he thinks Covid-inspired changes will stick, Mainelli believes that they will – for multiple reasons. First, because clients are happy their time is often saved through using digital signatures or other technology innovations that don’t require them to go to an office in person.
Second, this move has “put paid to the notion that you can’t train someone without meeting them physically”, which a lot of firms believed before they had to come up with ways of training junior lawyers remotely.
Lastly, hiring the best staff used to be location-dependent – that is, firms could hire the best commercial lawyer who could commute to the office, but now technology allows for them to live wherever they want and telecommute, so the talent pool is significantly widened.