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I'd love to hear more about perceived opportunities in legal tech. For some reason, the legal industry seems very averse to change, but I'm sure that's not alwa

I'd love to hear more about perceived opportunities in legal tech. For some reason, the legal industry seems very averse to change, but I'm sure that's not always going to be the case. (Lawyer here).

ideashower 8y ago
I'd love to hear more about the legal tech space in general.
lordnacho 8y ago
Partner in a law firm told me they were starting to test various techs to search through legal documents. You can imagine NLP being quite useful in sifting through piles of old cases, a step beyond simple text search.
ollerac 8y ago
I think this has a lot to do with perceived value and complexity from the side of the developer. For me: I don't know the first thing about law and the perceived value of building something in that space is low compared with, for example, healthcare, where I feel like a lot of people can more easily see the benefits on real people. I think if you can clearly define the areas where either the perceived value (for the developer) is really high or the perceived complexity is relatively low, that's where you'll see the next developments in this space. I'd be curious to know where you think these areas are.
xxpor 8y ago
First job of legal tech: convince the Judicial Conference to make PACER free and not terrible.
- kjhughes 8y ago
  Hopefully this pending legislation will pass: H.R.6714 - Electronic Court Records Reform Act of 2018 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6714 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6714
pierre 8y ago
For me the most interresting development is the rise of Law as Code. Lot of things happening in computational law/contract.
ABCLAW 8y ago
I've consulted for companies trying to get a good go to market plan for the legal sector. The sector is bonkers and the incentives are terrible. Most tech adoption is in the low-margin high-volume sectors, where 'good enough' products are dominant. Superior execution in this segment could lead to big wins. In the low-volume high-margin sector, many firms have proprietary workflows/inhouse staff dealing with their KM needs. That said, there's a few cute 'novel' approaches in new generation TAR and AI assisted [Insert mass document type sorting/classifying/digesting]. Beyond that I think the big developments aren't going to be in the area of 'can technology do something fundamentally new'. They'll be enabling tools to allow new business models. Think 'data-science consulting, reporting and expert witness testimony for legal discovery databases'. I also think that overall, professional development tools are underdeveloped, but young lawyers are undercapitalized and the core value bottleneck in low-volume work is the client intake pipeline, not getting good people to do the work. Edit: Added a missing word.
joddystreet 8y ago
The legal industry is not averse to change, the challenges are 1. Law is highly interpretable, it can't be just 1/0. Facts are 1/0, but not the law 2. Law firms tend to be small in size, generally <200, Lawyers are inclined to start their own practice ASAP. That limits the software provider's capability to charge more or upsell. Also, the law firms can't afford to buy a lot of software. 3. The distrust among people in the legal industry is just baffling There are a few more challenges, but am able to recollect only a few. (am a software engineer and my brother is a lawyer. we keep trying to build solutions for law firms)

I'd love to hear more about perceived opportunities in legal tech. For some reason, the legal industry seems very averse to change, but I'm sure that's not always going to be the case. (Lawyer here).

ideashower 8y ago

I'd love to hear more about the legal tech space in general.

lordnacho 8y ago

Partner in a law firm told me they were starting to test various techs to search through legal documents. You can imagine NLP being quite useful in sifting through piles of old cases, a step beyond simple text search.

ollerac 8y ago

I think this has a lot to do with perceived value and complexity from the side of the developer. For me: I don't know the first thing about law and the perceived value of building something in that space is low compared with, for example, healthcare, where I feel like a lot of people can more easily see the benefits on real people. I think if you can clearly define the areas where either the perceived value (for the developer) is really high or the perceived complexity is relatively low, that's where you'll see the next developments in this space. I'd be curious to know where you think these areas are.

xxpor 8y ago

First job of legal tech: convince the Judicial Conference to make PACER free and not terrible.

kjhughes 8y ago
Hopefully this pending legislation will pass: H.R.6714 - Electronic Court Records Reform Act of 2018 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6714 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6714

pierre 8y ago

For me the most interresting development is the rise of Law as Code. Lot of things happening in computational law/contract.

ABCLAW 8y ago

I've consulted for companies trying to get a good go to market plan for the legal sector. The sector is bonkers and the incentives are terrible. Most tech adoption is in the low-margin high-volume sectors, where 'good enough' products are dominant. Superior execution in this segment could lead to big wins. In the low-volume high-margin sector, many firms have proprietary workflows/inhouse staff dealing with their KM needs. That said, there's a few cute 'novel' approaches in new generation TAR and AI assisted [Insert mass document type sorting/classifying/digesting]. Beyond that I think the big developments aren't going to be in the area of 'can technology do something fundamentally new'. They'll be enabling tools to allow new business models. Think 'data-science consulting, reporting and expert witness testimony for legal discovery databases'. I also think that overall, professional development tools are underdeveloped, but young lawyers are undercapitalized and the core value bottleneck in low-volume work is the client intake pipeline, not getting good people to do the work. Edit: Added a missing word.

joddystreet 8y ago

The legal industry is not averse to change, the challenges are 1. Law is highly interpretable, it can't be just 1/0. Facts are 1/0, but not the law 2. Law firms tend to be small in size, generally <200, Lawyers are inclined to start their own practice ASAP. That limits the software provider's capability to charge more or upsell. Also, the law firms can't afford to buy a lot of software. 3. The distrust among people in the legal industry is just baffling There are a few more challenges, but am able to recollect only a few. (am a software engineer and my brother is a lawyer. we keep trying to build solutions for law firms)