Legal Tech and the Art of Invisibility

Why the future of legal technology is a world where we stop talking about legal technology.

For decades, we’ve been building legal technology. We’ve digitised documents, automated precedents, moved practice management to hosted products in the cloud, introduced knowledge management systems, embraced workflow and now, of course, adopted generative AI: each wave has promised its own transformations.  Some have even delivered genuine progress!

However, (are you sitting down?) legal technology, as we know it, is dying.

It is dying but not because it has failed, rather because AI is starting to succeed where traditional Practice Management Systems have traditional struggled to deliver a truly embedded service.

The future of legal technology is one in which it may cease to exist as a separate category.  It may simply become part of ‘legal practice’.

It’s a bit like electricity.

Nobody boasts that their office “uses electricity” or gets excited when they plug something in. The internet followed the same path. Twenty-five years ago, firms proudly talked about going “online.” Today, this is just part of the background hum of business and personal life.  Legal automation and artificial intelligence is likely to follow the same trajectory.

Today, firms proudly announce their AI strategies. Vendors place “AI-powered” labels on every product. Conferences debate how and why lawyers should embrace AI.  Within a decade, those conversations will seem quaint.

Legal Technology won’t be about individual applications, it will be the environment in which legal work happens.

The rise of ambient intelligence

The next generation of legal technology won’t wait to be asked.

Imagine opening a new matter – before you’ve written a single word, the system has already recognised the client, identified previous related matters, surfaced relevant precedents, suggested likely risks, assembled a draft project plan, prepared communications with the client and appropriate specialists, prepared engagement documentation, identified regulatory obligations and highlighted potential conflicts.  Not because you’ve clicked through six workflows but because the technology understands context.

Legal technology becomes less about responding to commands and more about anticipating intent.

From software to colleagues

Perhaps we’ve been thinking about AI in entirely the wrong way.  Rather than having passive software that awaits your command, we should be thinking about AI more as a diligent colleague who anticipates, notices, reminds, presents and challenges.  Of course, we must accept that even the best colleague makes mistakes, so we must also still check and verify the work that they are undertaking.

Increasingly, AI systems will behave less like applications and more like members of the team.  Not replacing lawyers but continuously supporting them… almost invisibly.

The new competitive advantage

For years, firms have competed through people, reputation and scale.  In the future one can expect increasing competition through overall organisational intelligence and performance.

• Which firm learns fastest?
• Which captures and delivers expertise most effectively?
• Which improves every completed matter?
• Which ensures one lawyer’s insight immediately becomes everyone’s advantage?
• Which firm removes the overheads and cuts straight to the client’s needs?

The most successful firms won’t necessarily own the most sophisticated AI but they will have built and capitalized on organisational intelligence.

The profession’s real challenge?

Technology is no longer the bottleneck – culture is.

Many firms still organise around hierarchy, departmental silos, individual expertise and hourly activity.  AI provides us with an opportunity to reward something entirely different.

• Shared knowledge
• Collaboration
• Continuous peer aided learning

The firms that flourish will be redesigning how expertise flows, is cleansed, graded and stored within their organisations and will have a system to continuously monitor and improve.