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Will Foulkes and Jermaine Smith are associates at a Top 100 UK law firm Thrings, which primarily act for clients from the South West. I had the pleasure of interviewing Will and Jermaine about their new initiative within the firm: the trainee coding programme. Thrings’ trainee coding programme is driven by the increasing availability […]

One of the roles of legal technology (Legal Tech) in arbitration is the provision of rapid insight into the results of law and fact scenarios. This allows arbitrators to endorse more reliable settlement approaches. Legal Tech has been used in arbitration for case management such as obtaining the meaning from files, identifying patterns in disputes, […]

While Europe and the US are seeing a rapid expansion in the legal tech industry, South Korea has just jumped on this tech bandwagon. There are just a handful of legal tech startups and only a few law firms that have explored the possibility of incorporating legal tech into their services. Some of the companies […]

By Alex Smith, Global Product Management Lead for iManage RAVN According to Gartner, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity by 2024. Similarly, Forrester forecasts that the total spending in low-code will hit $21.2 billion by 2022, representing a compound annual growth rate of roughly 40%. Clearly, the no-code/low-code movement is […]

In my last article I argued for the development of a justice API which allows robot lawyers to communicate directly with the court’s computer systems. This would unlock the evolution of robot lawyers in litigation by enabling them to act for — rather than merely advise — their clients. In this part I explore how […]

The modern age is characterised by many upheavals and far-reaching changes in short periods of time. Like many other professions these days, the concern regarding the future of the profession does not skip the legal community. How can one always “stay in the game” – the game that is constantly changing right before our eyes? […]

Challenges and opportunities in legal data analytics The legal industry sits on top of mountains of data, collected in various locations ranging from in-house contract management tools to government databases and platforms by commercial providers. According to a House of Commons briefing paper, 1.47 million criminal cases were disposed of in Magistrates’ Courts in 2018, […]

Future or fiction? Despite three months of automated chasing, Amy’s customer had still not paid her invoice. She got out her phone and started a conversation with a robot lawyer. It asked her questions about the debt and she explained what had happened. She uploaded documents including the original contract. Finally, the robot concluded that […]

“So what do you do?” It’s always a question we’re asked by others. Dates, parties, barbecues, activist meetings, golf outings. Anytime we meet someone new, the conversation often starts with establishing occupation. For me, the answer was easy. “I’m a lawyer”. But for the last few years, I get to say “I’m a legal technologist.” […]

The Covid-19 crisis has created an environment where working from anywhere has suddenly become the “new normal”. This has put digitalisation on the map for companies that want to achieve independence and flexibility in the way they operate. The legal department is not usually on the radar for many companies looking to drive digitalisation and […]

Before launching Office & Dragons, I was an M&A lawyer with Kirkland & Ellis in London and New York, advising large private equity firms on billion-dollar deals. In that time, I witnessed first-hand the mounting pressures that both our clients and our firm were facing. The way that deals get done is changing. Things are […]

Law firms aren’t naturally set up to deal with the challenges presented by our data-saturated world. Law firms have historically dealt with the problem of information management and document-review using labour-intensive solutions: armies of paralegals and junior lawyers. Anexsys, an eDiscovery and digital forensics consultancy, gives law firms the tools to organise and analyse huge […]

Introduction Flexible and agile working practices are emerging trends which have been adopted by law firms, to varying extents, as part of their working policies. This article will take a look at the key features in agile working and discuss the latest industry trend: the legal gig economy. Also, it will reflect how the current […]

Great irregularities in life always bring forth droves of people wondering ‘what next’. I will join their ranks and outline my views on what is going to happen next in legal technology and how the ongoing crisis will reshape the legal industry. I will start with the obvious. We consider the legal professions to be […]

We are on the verge of the next revolution, one that will happen within us. The tool that will enable that revolution is CRISPR Cas-9 (CRISPR is the acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). To put it simply, CRISPR is a system that makes it possible to cut a cell’s genome at a […]

Two major threats that the legal sector is facing at the moment are the growing number of alternative legal services providers (ALSPs) and the entry of the Big 4 accountancy firms – KPMG, Deloitte, EY and PwC. The result is an increasingly competitive market where clients want services that are price efficient. In response, law […]

In 2020, it feels like old news to be commenting on the rise of the legal tech market worldwide. Considering the progress of technologies such as machine learning, deep learning and quantum computing, allied to the fact humans can’t seem to just live in perfect harmony, legal tech is here to stay and will effectively […]

The European Legal Tech Association (ELTA) relies on a strong network of influential legal tech pioneers from all over Europe and beyond. Therefore, we asked our Board Members and Ambassadors to look back at 2019 to analyze the takeaways of another exciting year for the European legaltech scene, and to share with us a forecast […]

The legal contracts landscape in any organisation is in a perpetual state of flux because of the wide and continually expanding variety of formats. Over the years, traditional paper contracts have been joined by digital alternatives like PDF and Word contracts, which in turn, are being joined by smart contracts that are underpinned by emerging […]

There are 5.7 million businesses in the UK and just 140,000 solicitors (there’s even fewer if we just focus on corporate law). Looking at the numbers, it’s no wonder that fees are high and hours are long for lawyers. Based on this, it is clear why the LegalTech industry has boomed over the past few […]