The legal industry has seen major shifts in technology in recent years, and many of the advantages are especially apparent in the number of new products and services available to law firms. But underlying the growth of the legal tech industry is a fundamental shift in how these services are built, and the resulting impacts they’ll have on the practice of law.
Part of the shift has to do with the new technologies, services, and capabilities offered. But perhaps the greatest advancement is the speed at which they’re being developed—and the resulting iterative collaboration that’s brought us to a new era in how we think about legal as a service.
It’s also worth noting that the new legal technology infrastructure is bigger than any one product or producer. Instead, it relies on the cyclical collaboration of innovators, users, and outside stakeholders. To take a real world example, cars are designed to operate within the various road environments that exist around the world. Car designs have shaped how we think about transportation and how we get around in the world, but those cars are also shaped by their drivers and the roads they rely on.
For legal technology, how have their inherent infrastructures changed and what implications will they have in the coming years?
1. The Move to the Cloud
Without a doubt, the shift of legal technologies to the cloud has opened up new opportunities for law firms, giving them the ability to work seamlessly from anywhere in the world with access to all of their firm’s information. If you’re unfamiliar with what the cloud entails, it includes the seamless access to information over the internet through services such as Dropbox, Facebook, Gmail, Evernote, and countless others designed for both industry and consumer applications.
Whether you’re operating as a solo or within a large legal team, the advantages to getting secure, instant access to any information in your firm are unprecedented. But most firms won’t be aware of the deeper implications of relying on services that operate through the internet.
The internet is the most revolutionary technology brought to mainstream use since the printing press. Making it work, however, means developing and adhering to clear, commonly used standards. These standards are based on the data structures, protocols, and languages commonly used to share data online, and they also comprise the requirements necessary for viewing information across commonly used software and devices (e.g., on OS/iOS, Android, and Windows-based platforms across mobile devices, tablets, and laptop or desktop computers).
For example, MySQL is an open-source database system widely adopted by internet software providers. Since it’s so widely used, it’s become a common structure for organizing and retrieving information in a database format, which also makes it much easier to communicate and share data between different software.
This is where many legacy legal software solutions of the previous generation show their age. Much desktop-based software (the kind you need to download or install from a CD) was developed using proprietary data structures, making it difficult to integrate with other products.
When it comes to the upside of common standards, it’s not just the infrastructure that’s being affected. With so many players actively collaborating, the user experience is a major focus for improvement as well. The W3C standards on accessibility are a prime example, where industry leaders are actively working together to define best practices for ensuring that people of all abilities can access and consume information over the internet as easily as possible.
The implications here are huge. We’re not just seeing the rapid improvement of software services. When companies work toward the same set of standards, products no longer need to be built from scratch; they can rely instead on open-source repositories that are always growing and are regularly tested by contributors.
Again, this is where desktop services lag behind. As they look to virtually reinvent the wheel every time they release a new version update, they miss out on the opportunity to leverage the learning and efficiency that go into what have become given industry standards among other products.
The results are twofold: 1) internet-based products are being developed and improved at a much more rapid pace than any other product ever, helping them solve problems faster; and 2) common standards create growing opportunities for better integrations between services to open up new efficiencies, learning, and collaboration.
2. No Software Is an Island
The internet is a place for communication and collaboration, and this applies to technology as much as it does its users.
For software in the legal industry, what’s really interesting about the growing interoperability of services is that knowledge management is essentially being crowdsourced from the thousands of firms using these services. As a product becomes more viable and grows a substantial user base, developers get a better scope of how professionals want to conduct their business through their everyday interactions with these products.
The result is that new legal technologies can develop new features and refine existing ones based on that information, using input from thousands of professionals, making them more efficient with better user experience
Whether your firm is just starting out, or established and looking to improve processes, adopting new technologies can offer access to best practices and new information structures that are becoming increasingly plug and play. Legal professionals get the benefit of templated workflows and information structures when they sign up for these products.
And, of course, as adoption grows, the broader user base incorporates more diversity and more opportunities for learning—and, in turn, more robust development.
With internet-based services, we’ve also seen the rise of software platforms that facilitate a collaborative ecosystem between many products within an industry or set of related services.
Consider platforms such as Salesforce and Amazon, where a service acts as the hub for a broader ecosystem of related services that each build upon each other. The Salesforce AppExchange now offers more than 4,000 solutions that integrate directly with the core app. Users can customize how they use Salesforce by leveraging supporting niche services tailored to the specifics of their unique industry or market.
Similarly, Amazon customers can access a broader scope of products than is available directly from Amazon itself. Customers can benefit from private services affiliated to the parent company who are able to build on Amazon’s overarching structure to deliver products faster and with the same—or often better—convenience.
What’s key to each of these examples is that the service ecosystem agrees on a certain way of doing things. Underlying all of these service platforms is the development of a universal communication channel, the application programming interface (API), which essentially creates a defined means for other services to interact with a given software program.
When we look at the expanding ecosystem for legal technology, firms can get access to a broader set of tools and services designed specifically for certain practice areas and their unique workflows. Services like NextChapter for bankruptcy lawyers and Prima Facie for immigration lawyers integrate with a practice management software like Clio through APIs. In turn, developers for each service get to work with a broader set of customers and technologies, giving them further insight on how to better tailor their products. Practice area-specific software can leverage the work done by Clio on systems like matter and contact management, while Clio learns the specific data needed by these practitioners from their tools. Integration partners define and shape each other in an iterative fashion that benefits everyone.
Technology companies that don’t play well with others will commit costly, avoidable mistakes. This will harm lawyers, law firms, and the clients that rely on them. They will continue to lose customers, market share, and the public’s trust.
3. Imposed Industry Standards
As collaboration in legal technology expands into bigger law firms, these technologies end up being held to a higher standard to suit the needs of everyone. In many cases, these standards are being driven by requirements imposed by clients.
A good example is the New York’s Cybersecurity Regulation 500 (23 NYCRR Part 500) that establishes strict data security rules for financial services companies. The regulation dictates what precautions financial institutions need to have in place to protect the sensitive information of their clients. The regulation tells banks what rules they are subject to, which also apply to any associated vendors. This means that these financial institutions, which include insurance companies and other bodies regulated by the Department of Financial Services, can only hire law firms that adhere to these rules.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is another example. Any covered entity that deals with protected health information must comply with HIPAA, which includes law firms providing services to covered entities under business associates agreements.
23 NYCRR Part 500 and HIPAA show how client-based requirements influence legal services, and they’ve also spurred initiatives within the legal technology sphere as well. The Legal Cloud Computing Association (LCCA) was formed in 2010 to create a collaborative environment for setting industry standards that have helped guide new ethics opinions for legal technology providers and the legal professionals they serve. As a result, the LCCA has brought together learnings to identify potential risks and address needs via a set of standards unique to the legal industry.
Why does this matter? We’re seeing more firms organize themselves in a way that allows them to collaborate and share information. Cybersecurity threats are emerging that are unique to law firms, as they target the sensitive information often held on behalf of their clients. DLA Piper, a firm that’s seen its operations paralyzed by a ransomware attack, is a good example here.
It doesn’t do the industry any good if some firms hold themselves to a high security standard while the rest of the industry lags. If security breaches become more common, the industry as whole will suffer from an overall lack of trust.
The industry needs to come together in taking data security seriously, and many cloud services offer a significant opportunity for firms to do this, at minimal cost. Rather than spend money on competing for a limited pool of dedicated security experts to implement custom safeguards on a one-off basis for firms running in-house servers, law firms can rely on cloud services that have already invested in the necessary security measures. These services can offer industry-leading security, research, and development, which are included in their services at no extra cost (just remember that not all cloud providers are created equal in this regard).
A New Competitive Framework for Law Firms and Legal Technology
When we consider all the ways in which legal technology infrastructure is shaping the practice of law, making lawyers more nimble, more efficient, and more secure, the firms that thrive are the ones that will leverage the most advanced capabilities available—making them more competitive and less likely to be left behind. The same can be said of legal technology companies. Those companies that focus on technology standards and leverage platform learnings will accelerate past all competitors.
Those that opt to go it alone, relying on the services of companies working within the confines of their own proprietary silos, will not only lag behind—they’ll pay for it. Crowdsourced information and knowledge structures are designed to benefit everyone. They also help ensure that we all work across an agreed-upon, standardized infrastructure, at a rapid pace. Together, we can improve the practice of law for both firms and our clients.
Joshua Lenon is the Lawyer in Residence at Clio, the most-widely used cloud practice management software. A New York-admitted attorney, Joshua provides legal scholarship to Clio on issues relating to technology, privacy, and lawyers’ ethical duties of competency. In addition to Clio, Joshua is one of the founders of the Vancouver Legal Hackers chapter, a frequent speaker on legal technology, and amateur chef. You can email Joshua at joshua@clio.com and follow him on Twitter @joshualenon.
Bryce Tarling is a Copywriter at Clio. With a background in digital and print publications, Bryce offers writing, editing, and communications services geared toward improving legal practice through technology. Contributions include the Legal Trends Report. He’s probably drinking a fair trade coffee right now.
