From Sam Moore and Callum Sinclair of Burness Paull LLP
2017 was a breakthrough year for legal technology in terms of broad
acceptance and adoption of particular applications. We believe that 2018 will
be a year of ‘multipliers’, ie how those discrete legal tech products can be
interfaced with one another, and leveraged to become greater than the sum of
their parts. This will necessitate a deeper understanding of package APIs and
degrees of data interoperability, concepts which until now have received
relatively little attention from the profession. Artificial intelligence will
continue to provide new tools, but increasingly we will need emotional intelligence
to wield them and keep the ‘service’ in ‘legal services’.
Good communication has always been crucial to good client service, and
we believe 2018 will bring specific innovations in how we lawyers communicate
with our clients in an increasingly data-centric world. We expect to see new
tools coming to the market to streamline how we share key information at each
step, and giving our clients better visibility of their data. The days of
playing ‘phone tag’ may finally come to a welcome end, if clients can access
real-time data about their matters via new project collaboration or reporting
tools.”
Sam Moore is a Legal Technologist (Qualified Solicitor)
AMBCS at Burness Paull LLP
Callum Sinclair is a Partner and Head of the Technology
Sector and Divisional Head of Commercial at Burness Paull LLP
