Staying Ahead: Legal Trends to Watch in 2024 📈💼

AI took center stage this year, dominating headlines and discussions everywhere. But what's in store for 2024? Will the relentless pace of new tool development sustain the AI frenzy, or are we at the point of AI fatigue? 

In Henchman's Legal Tech Trends 2024 report, Jorn Vanysacker, Founder and Co-CEO, raises crucial questions: What problems are we addressing, which use cases are relevant, and which technology is the optimal solution?

In this edition of The Automated Lawyer, we’ll tap into expert voices sharing insights on the legal tech landscape, its purpose, and their vision for the ideal legal tech stack in 2024 and beyond.

Unleashing the Power of Unstructured Data: What’s Next for Legal Tech

Cheryl Wilson Griffin, CEO at Legal Tech Consultants contends the Golden Age of Legal Tech is here, built upon four transformations in the legal industry.

1. Money: Legaltech is drawing unprecedented outside investment. During 9 months in 2021, over $1 billion was invested in legal tech, followed by $700 million in 2023. 

2. Acceptance of Cloud Computing: With major financial institutions embracing the cloud in their strategic goals, even conservative firms are relaxing their bans on cloud-based solutions

3. Changing work attitudes: The new generation of professionals is challenging large law firms to reconsider traditional practices.

4. Technological Advancements: The widespread availability of AI like ChatGPT, quantum computing breakthroughs, and seamless API integration are revolutionizing the legal industry.

Building on the foundation for the Golden Age of legal tech, Griffin anticipates that the future will revolve around extracting insights from unstructured data, citing that a staggering 80% of an enterprise's data falls into this category.

She notes that tools are already in existence, designed to generate new ways of getting value from your data.

• PreDiscovered: Cuts duplicative review costs for identical company documents across multiple cases

• Streamline.ai: Breaks down silos between corporate legal and business units, turning unstructured data into automated workflows.

• Darrow.ai: Mines public databases, merging data with proprietary data points to predict outcomes and identify opportunities for high-impact litigation. 

• Patented.ai: Integrates public patent databases, your data, and their tech for more efficient infringement detection

Embracing the Golden Era of Legal Tech: Andrei Salajan

Andrei Salajan, Head of Legal Tech and Digitalisation at Schoenherr Attorneys at Law, a leading Austrian law firm, echoes Griffin’s belief that we are in a golden era of legal tech. He predicts the following:

• Firms will need to allocate significant time educating employees on the capabilities and limitations of new LLM models

• Expect improvements related to many critical workflows like document review, contract lifecycle management, and know-how management. 

• Expect several trends and initiatives aimed at cleaning up document management systems and preparing relevant data for AI use cases

• Technology will play a more important role for solutions to legal issues that involve higher volumes of structured data

Prerequisites for AI Success: Jeffrey Pfeifer’s Focus Areas

Jeffrey Pfeifer, Chief Product Officer at LexisNexis Canada, UK, and USA, highlights the potential for significant productivity gains with generative AI but underscores that their realization is not assured. 

Legal organizations must prepare for a future workplace that leverages generative AI, especially since they are prime candidates for becoming AI factories–having the potential to be prolific producers of AI solutions. Legal organizations possess important prerequisites for success: large data repositories, demand for content creation, and unique domain knowledge requirements.

He calls for a deliberate focus on four areas: cloud investment, internal technology infrastructure design, content and data system modernization, and commitment to human resource skill development.

1. Cloud: AI success hinges on cloud-based data management for its vital computational capacity.

2. Infrastructure: Effective AI implementation requires intentional investment in cloud-centric technology to guarantee data accessibility with robust security and privacy safeguards.

3. Data: As firms and in-house teams evaluate knowledge management strategies, they should prioritize the identification of high-quality sample data

4. Skill Development: Prompt education for lawyers, prompt template building, data sampling, and quality scoring are all areas where leading organizations are investing.

In one year, Pfeifer anticipates we will see the “near-ubiquitous deployment of AI capabilities” and “wonder how these tasks could have been performed manually in the past.”

He concludes his opinion with a sentiment we’ve echoed in the past,

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Until next time,

Nima, Ian, and the JusticeArch team