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Lawyered brings you another session of #AskMyMentor by Mr Himanshu Gupta, Co-founder - Lawyered, on Why Law Students should get “legal tech-ready”

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Excerpts from the Webinar

1. The Introduction

1. Technology, throughout history, has transformed our lives and has played the role of a catalyst of change. 

2. No business or industry has remained unaffected by the Digital Revolution and the Internet Age. 

3. However - for the longest time, Legal Industry has been averse to adapt to the technological calling. 

4. This unwillingness can be attributed largely to the fact that the creation and application of the law has always been seen to be a matter of reaching consensus through dialogue, where technology hardly has any role to play. 

5. But the traditional conservative field of law is now changing. 

6. Legal-tech has transformed from merely being a buzzword to becoming the future of law. 

2. Experiment -

• In an experiment conducted by a well-known legal Artificial Intelligent Platform, twenty experienced lawyers were pitted against an AI trained program to evaluate legal contracts. 

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• The AI program won by achieving an accuracy of 95% while the lawyers achieved, on average, an 85% accuracy rate. The AI program also completed the task in 26 seconds, while the human lawyers took 92 minutes on average. 

• Although this experiment proved to be an eye-catching headline, it is not the only way Legal-Tech is challenging the norm. 

3. Areas where legal tech is being used

• In high-volume areas - like Contract Management, E-discovery & Legal Search, Legal-Tech is already - standardizing, automating, and ‘productizing’ what were once labour-intensive tasks performed by lawyers at law firms. 

• A recently published report showed that lawyers are spending only 2.3 hours on billable tasks - this accounts for less than 30% of an 8-hour workday. 

• The rest of the time is spent on administrative tasks and retaining clients. 

• In such a scenario, the advent of technology in Practice Management for lawyers, seems less of a choice and more of a necessity. 

4. How is the legal fraternity responding to this technological calling?

• Law firms are quickly realizing the value of Legal-Tech and are trying to adapt. Some have even started generating significant revenue by coming up with their own niche client-facing apps and tools. 

• More firms than ever are now signing up for Due Diligence tools. 

• Smart Contracts, Property & Financial Transactions, Intellectual Property Registry – all will be powered by the Blockchain in the future.

• AI is also being adapted to create solutions which are a hybrid of technology with traditional, face-to-face lawyer/client contact. All this would vastly increase the efficiency of lawyers through predictive electronic discovery, intelligent legal research and automated document preparation. 

• As technology automates such large chunk of the tasks, which are usually assigned to the junior lawyers, it would give rise to a more linear structure of a law firm, which would be a shift from the traditional pyramidal structure. 

5. Does this have any negative implications for the jobs in the legal industry?

• There have been several concerns amongst the legal fraternity regarding how these advanced technologies would render the lawyers useless. 

• But the reality is that technology is still a long way off from replicating the people skills, social awareness and intuition required to make a good lawyer. 

• The only thing it would do is, it would make their job more efficient. 

• For example: having the AI do a first review of an NDA,  would be much like having a paralegal doing a spot-check. This would free up valuable time for lawyers to focus on client counselling and other higher-value work. 

• Former SC Judge - Hon’ble Mr. Justice A.K. Sikri was right in stating that “Artificial Intelligence will be augmenting lawyers’ capabilities but cannot take the place of a lawyer as advocacy is a matter of emotions and human empathy.” 

• Thus the fear of lawyers becoming obsolete are absolutely unfounded. 

6. While most of these legal-tech tools are helping in increasing productivity and saving valuable time of a legal professional, very few are helping them in increasing their business and clientele through long term sustainable solutions.

7. Another area which Legal-Tech is transforming is how we find lawyers. 

• With the population of internet users crossing the 4.5 Billion mark in 2020, showing a 7% growth year-on-year, consumer demand through the internet is driving big changes in the way we find lawyers. 

• In the past, businesses and individuals found lawyers through personal connections or word-of-mouth. 

• However, personal referrals can be as inefficient in law as in any other industry, as your network might not know the right type of lawyer for you. 

• This is where the online platforms, like Lawyered, are adding value. 

• Such platforms are solving the core needs of a legal professional - such as increasing clientele, generating more business and higher visibility across the geographies. 

8. So what can law students do?

• Understand the basics and understand them well. Law graduates should be able to use Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint to a sophisticated level. Can you use formulas, references, macros and pivot tables? Everybody claims they can do these things but few can really do so. 

• You should be able to use search engines (including advance search, Boolean operators, and how to discern between good and bad results). 

• You should be able to use research tools like Lexis Nexis, Manupatra, SCC Online, LexBuddy, etc. Once in practice, you don’t want to spend hours and hours researching a point and accumulating a large spend unnecessarily.

• Trust me - that this knowledge combined with an understanding of technology was at least as important as legal knowledge.

• Attending legal hackathons in your area would be useful. These are increasingly common and a good way to learn from industry insiders, network, and collaborate with students in another department 

• Participating in moot-courts and other related campaigns and competitions are equally important

9. To summarize

• Build your Legal Knowledge outside of class- Apart from what you learn in your institute, invest time in gaining additional knowledge through various online/ offline course. 

• Gain Practical Experience - Understand how legal knowledge is applied to solve real-life legal issues through online/ offline internships, participating in competitions and campaigns, networking, moot-court competitions, etc

• Expose yourself to Legal-Tech Tools - Understand how various tools are used to do effective research work or are used to reduce the time spent on administrative tasks

• Digital Foot-print - Whatever you do, keep building the digital footprint that will help you outshine your competition