Greece
The legal tech landscape of 2024 in Greece will be shaped by a few notable firms who invest in digital operations and marketing and a few efforts on legal design and open source. I wouldn’t be very confident on startups within the legal tech sector – most probably regtech and compliance tools will gain a momentum, though we do witness an interest of in-house legal teams in all things generative AI, even at an experimental value. To summarize, further digitization of the market is in progress while various e-gov and e-justice reforms may accelerate the appetite of the private sector for digital solutions yet not a solid growth of innovative services at place.
Konstantinos Anagnostopoulos
ELTA Ambassador Greece, Founder, Athens Legal Tech
Italy
Law firms and internal legal departments are focusing their interest on generative AI and legal project management, to make a step forward in the direction of more organized and efficient legal work. It also seems that there is more attention to the design of internal and external operations in the light of legal leverages and aspects, which entails hiring change consultants who are skilled in legal project management, legal design and using legal tech and management tools.
It seems that education about legal tech and innovation in legal is still low in universities and in law societies, but there is a high demand for such education in mid-career legal professionals: this could mean that the need and benefits of adopting legal tech and switching from tradition to innovation are more clear to those who already have practiced law or worked in organizations, while the students and legal trainee are more focused on the traditional basis of legal and professional knowledge.
The switching of the justice system to digitalization and platform-based approach too is providing – or forcing – a change in the set of skills that each legal professional needs to have.
Nicolino Gentile
ELTA Ambassador Italy, Partner, BLB Studio Legale
Silvano Lorusso
ELTA Ambassador Italy, Partner, BLB Studio Legale
Spain
The year ahead will see the rise of the “real” use of GenAI within legaltech tools. Several tools are integrating this tech to their already existing tools as we speak, launching their offer by the end of 2023/beginning of 2024.
We will also see some mergers and acquisitions within the legaltech ecosystem, consolidating the market and supporting the international growth of Spanish companies.
Eventually, 2024 will also be the year of a broader adoption of legal design as the glue (and the methodology!) between the different layers of tech/legal tech products and the changes in legal services provision within organizations. User-centricity will finally stop being a buzzword to become an attainable goal for the industry.
Laura Fauqueur
ELTA Ambassador Spain, Founder, Legal Shake
Portugal
2024 could be an interesting year for Portuguese legaltech.
We hope that the new law on Professional Orders will stabilize and with greater liberalization new startups will appear in the area of providing legal services or, at least, facilitating them. In any case, it is important to note that the climate created by the Bar Association also scares entrepreneurs who are shying away from legal volatility.
On the government side, the strong digitalization of public justice services is expected to continue, although with confusing interconnections with the private sector, which limits innovation to state capacity.
Legaltech remains more or less the same with interesting growth although still with some inability to internationalize. At the moment, Portugal has startups such as Legau, Datalex, Arkeyvata, DocDigitizer, Lyme, My Data Manager, Portal da Queixa, Valdoc, Smarter Succession and Software Houses and Consultants such as InovaLegal, Roox, Genesis Studio and Legal Walkers.
Marisa Monteiro Borsboom,
ELTA Ambassador Portugal
Gonçalo Piriquito,
Cofounder APLT
Turkey
Legal Tech has been a slowly progressing field within Turkey comparing to the population of 85 million people and a market of at least 170.000 lawyers in 2023. Most of the legal tech products are in the office management, privacy compliance automation and legal research segments. Only a few numbers of legal tech companies directly serve the consumers while mostly addressing the legal professionals and entities as clients. Even though there is a resistance in the market, there is also a great interest especially among law students and young professionals. This creates a driving force which will likely to continue also due to highly competitive legal market. However, the turmoil in the Turkey’s economy is another driving force where companies decrease their innovation expenses and focus more on the efficiency results. Thus, either a neutral state or a little growth in legal tech market is expected in the upcoming year. I expect the growth to be in contract lifecycle management solutions, online dispute resolution systems due to the change in the mediation rules and finally a continued development in the privacy automation software. Another expectation is the increase in the legal tech media resources in Turkish and strengthening of the legal tech ecosystem through accelerators such as Founders Institute programme.
Ebru Metin
ELTA Ambassador Turkey, Founder, Legal Design Turkey
