Key Legal Technology Trends in 2021

CIO Applications| Tuesday, June 01, 2021

Although legal technology has been improving for many years, use has exploded in the last year.

FREMONT, CA: Although legal technology has been improving for many years, its use has doubled in the recent years. While certain lawyers and companies were tech-savvy and innovative before the COVID pandemic, the rest of the legal profession are drove to adapt by necessity due to the pandemic. Firms shut their doors, printed records were no longer accessible, and the legal system shifted to virtual hearings overnight.

The following few of the developments emerged during the legal profession's most rapid technological transformation in modern history.

Virtual conference technology

Although video calls weren't new when COVID struck, the extensive usage of Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and many other video conferencing technologies inside law firms and even with clients has risen as the pandemic has forced everybody to work remotely.

Digitization of documents

Law firms invested a lot of effort and money in 2020, digitizing their paper-based systems as law offices and court proceedings became more remote. While the move was pressurizing, other trends accelerated as companies integrated systems and software replaced cabinets in the way even the tiniest and most traditional law firms arranged themselves.

Automation

Lawyers and legal firms are currently auditing their document management systems. Many national and foreign companies use different goods in different jurisdictions and are now aiming for platform uniformity. Larger companies are constantly looking for jurisdiction-agnostic software that can be helpful in several languages.

Cybersecurity

While cybersecurity was, or should have been, top-of-mind for law firms even before the pandemic, the shift to remote employment prompted every lawyer to reconsider their role in combating cyber attackers.Law firms are late to the cloud game. Still, with improved internet connections and capacity and COVID's strong-arming of the industry into remote employment, the change is unavoidable. On-premise servers, as an option, are still subject to hacking.

Data privacy

The ever-evolving privacy speculations for managing raw data go hand in hand with practical concerns regarding data security. Data privacy has never been so crucial for law firms and their clients, with litigation relating to the loss of personal information on the rise and in-house departments needing to spend more time preparing incident response plans.

Data analysis

While there was a scoot to digitize everything as organizations went remote when COVID went into effect, there are many more advantages to digitizing for business and in-house legal departments rather than fast access. Although e-discovery was one of the first places where lawyers were droving to invest in legal technology, innovations enabled firms and in-house legal departments to gain insights from their data developed daily.