The story of the last century or so has been one of enormous technological change, much of which has been felt over the past few years and decades. There’s no area of business that’s been untouched by it: from retail to manufacturing to communication, they’re all unrecognisable from just a few decades ago.
The legal industry is no question. As new technological tools become available, lawyers across the planet are gradually bringing them to bear upon the challenges they face in day-to-day operations – from the legal challenges to the more practical ones, such as how to communicate with clients.
Let’s take a look at a few of the legal innovations which might shape the profession in the near-future.
Virtual Assistants
We might think of the legal profession as a highly-skilled one to which machines aren’t yet suited. But there’s a lot of drudgery involved, all of which can accumulate into a slower response time for the client. Outsourcing this work, in part, to machines, might help to streamline the process completely.
It’s unlikely that this transition will be a sudden one. Legal assistants might find themselves working alongside virtual assistants to begin with, leaving them with more time to focus on more creativity-intensive work that actually requires a human touch.
Voice Dictation
Certain areas of law are enormously dependent on dictation. This is one area where machines have become enormously capable, thanks to advances in machine learning, and the abundance of data that we’re volunteering, as a society, to services like Amazon’s Alexa.
Given that most of us speak much faster than we write, this can be an enormous time-saver. And since the voice-recognition system can do the transcribing instantaneously, legal secretaries might find themselves doing a more editorial job, cleaning up the few mistakes that slip through the net.
Paperless Offices
While there are certain parts of the legal profession that can’t shift away from the printed word, internal memos and other communications have largely made the shift to remaining entirely in the digital one. This confers environmental benefits as well as immediate practical ones.
Virtual Meetings
The explosion in working-from-home practices that we all experienced in 2020 is likely to have lasting consequences. One of them is the cultural norm for video conferencing. Both clients and staff may be able to communicate remotely, which opens the door to considerable time savings. You might arrange meetings with several clients in the same timeframe that it once took to see just one – and there’s no danger that you’ll be stood up or kept waiting.
This means, potentially, more frequent meetings with clients, more information conveyed, more questions addressed, and, generally speaking, a more complete and rounded service.
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