This is a companion piece to Legaltech News' January print feature, examining the next decade in law and technology from regulatory and practice of law trends. This article does a deep dive into the tech-centric changes legal technologists should expect—which, as it turns out, may sound awfully familiar to those paying attention.

It would be harsh to call legal technologies back in 2010 "simple," but it also wouldn't be wholly inaccurate. E-discovery and technology-assisted review (TAR) were maturing, but processing speeds were slow and review costs sky high. Automation was rare; artificial intelligence wasn't yet a buzzword. Microsoft Azure didn't debut until February 2010, and though Amazon Web Services (AWS) was around, Amazon didn't even fully put its own systems in the cloud until November 2010.

It was, simply put, a different time. And yet, many believe that changes in technology since then have not materially impacted how lawyers operate on a day-to-day basis.

"Historically, big-ticket work has driven investment because there were substantial, easily visible costs that drove investment. But how legal work happens has changed surprisingly little," says Jason Barnwell, a corporate legal operations professional board member at the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium. "Much of the work still happens as an artisanal craft process."

Indeed, although cloud computing and enterprise software has shifted a number of industries and presented opportunities for tech-enabled disrupters, new technologies have not presented what author Richard Susskind would call "transformation." Michael Kemps, the CEO of Innovative Computing Systems, notes that these changes happen in update cycles at many legal organizations and law firms, "and they tend to be one upgrade cycle behind the rest of corporate America. That will not change."

"They're very sensitive to change; they tend to be late adopters," Kemps adds. "Once they're comfortable, they're very resistant to adapting, because they're so concerned about billable time and being functional and effective. As a result, they will continue to stay slow adopters, even though we will see exponential change in the industry."

Susskind himself agrees, noting that even with the legal industry talking about AI or machine learning, actual applications remain largely via TAR or experimental in front-office processes. Compared to other industries, he says, "we're quite late to the party as a legal profession."

With this in mind, the technologies that will change legal in the 2020s may not be "new" technologies at all, at least in the short term. In fact, many legal tech experts agree that the next decade will be defined by technologies you know, applied in new and novel ways.

Above the Clouds

Mary Mack, the CEO of EDRM who has worked in e-discovery for nearly three decades, doesn't want to call a rise in cloud computing a prediction, because "it's already there." But even with widespread adoption, she notes, law firms aren't taking full advantage of cloud features, largely due to the need to have top-notch security. "Unless you're Big Law top 20, I don't think you have those kind of standards." 

But in the next decade, she sees a move from cloud as a efficiency enabler to a near de facto standard for law firms and legal organizations. From a monetary standpoint, she says, it only makes sense. "It frees up capital that would have been put into machines and the people to run and tend the machines. It frees up that capital to make applications that can be used to help attorneys serve their markets, to serve their clients with more innovations."

Kemps, whose Innovative Computing Solutions aids law firms and legal departments with IT projects, says individual cloud tools in the early 2010s "caught on in the Am Law 100 and went down from there." But particularly after AWS and Azure made cloud desktops available, smaller law firms have a chance to be innovators moving into the next decade.

"Because smaller firms have the ability to be more nimble, quicker and adapt, I've actually found it easier to convince our clients that are of smaller size to do full-scale cloud migrations as they hit upgrade periods than the other way around," he explains, later adding, "You can't go to an Am Law 100 firm and say, 'We're going to move you fully to the cloud in a weekend.'"

Kemps expects the next major cloud-based upgrades to come with document management systems that include more rapid development of AI, simultaneous editing, intelligent learning, and dictation. Because of the ubiquity of these solutions, he says, "Even the smallest firm can expect that advanced technology within a reasonable period of time."

Efficiency Above All

The small-firm piece is crucial due to a common belief when it comes to tech adoption: There simply isn't enough time, or budget, or both. Any technology that becomes pervasive in the 2020s, experts say, will not only need to be easy to use, but easy to install, disseminate and update as well.

Author Susskind has explored the intersection of law and technology in multiple books; perhaps contrary to popular opinion, he sees law as having an appetite for change, without an aversion to trying new models for delivery such as alternative legal service providers. It simply needs to happen on an organization's preferred timeline.

"They're not saying dogmatically, 'We want only one kind of organization.' The market seems quite open-minded," Susskind says. "The real test may well be who makes it easier or more convenient for the client to receive this combination of high-end legal advice together with far better and improved process."

Especially with an increasing number of legal technology companies occupying new niches and old practice areas alike, marrying people and process to the tech component will be paramount in the next decade. Indeed, that convenience is what Wendy Butler Curtis, chief innovation officer at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, values when analyzing technologies for her firm. She notes that "even for a law firm of our size, with as advanced and sophisticated an innovation department as we have, we're currently tracking more than 600 legal technologies."

"That's just not sustainable, if nothing else it's purchase fatigue," Curtis says. She adds that the more companies there are, the harder differences are to parse: "If there are 15 players in the market, what's the difference?"

That's why Curtis not only predicts legal tech industry consolidation to "a handful of legal platforms," but also that the technology making the most impact in legal may be another concept seen elsewhere: an app store. She says law firm tech purchasing isn't much different from swiping through a personal cellphone: You're much more likely to try technology if an outside party has taken time to vet its value proposition, and the fewer clicks it takes to download, the more likely one is to try it.

"Right now, bringing in legal technology is actually a pretty burdensome process for law firms, between negotiating the contract, doing the security audit, explaining to the client whether it's going to be an on prem or cloud service offering, even vetting the technology to get a contract in place for a pilot," Curtis explains. "It's very labor-intensive. Once all of that becomes in essence the embedded service offering of the app store, the ability to test and deploy technology will be accelerated exponentially. It's really even hard for me to find the words for how much I think that will accelerate the adoption and use of technology."

In the end, it's all about what has become a mantra in recent days for legal technologists: getting lawyers back to what lawyers do best. CLOC's Barnwell sees corporate legal operations professionals preferring technologies in the next decade that continue to move attorneys away from administrative tasks like e-billing and outside counsel management to service delivery.

"So many legal professionals spend their time on work that is emotionally satisfying because their customers are really good at saying thank you, but that has too little business impact to make it worth applying scarce human time," he says. "We need legal professionals spending 80% of their time on the 20% of issues that require judgment. They are bogged down answering the same questions. Legal operations systemically optimizing this is the next step for many operations teams."

The Practical Applications of AI

This is where artificial intelligence and automation come into the picture: Automating and optimizing rote tasks has been a goal of technologists for years, and will continue to be in the next decade. It's just that, as law firms and legal departments realize what they truly need, the end result doesn't come out necessarily looking like a Jetsons-esque robotic assistant. Instead, the change may be more gradual.

"Everybody says the robots are going to take over for the secretaries. I'm not sure if it's going to be that aggressive, but I see much more use of AI and predictive technologies," Kemps says. He gives the example of a lawyer that sits down and works on a draft document, but rather than opening an empty Word document, the environment knows what the lawyer has worked on and is able to grab precedent and citations. He sees "much more automation relative to the creation of documents, not so much related to macros and templates, but intelligence related to the creation of the document itself."

Doesn't sound too far-fetched? Don Fancher, U.S. and global forensic leader for Deloitte, believes natural language processing in law isn't as nascent as some may believe. He points to data extraction capabilities in software from Kira Systems, Seal Software, Deloitte's own D-Tracks and others. "Does it have more advancement that is required? Absolutely, and that will continue. Will that get there in the next five to 10 years? I absolutely believe so."

Contract AI is a burgeoning market exactly because of those easily accessible time savings, he says: Contract lifecycle management tools allow for malleability within risk parameters, without requiring a time-consuming back and forth. It takes a lot of the lesser value time out of the attorney's hands and puts that in the business unit's hands. "The business is happy, and the lawyers are happy," Fancher adds. "It doesn't mean you need to reduce the number of lawyers in your legal department, although that is one avenue that is able to be accomplished. But hopefully, it allows your attorneys to add more value to the organization, because they're not spending their time just negotiating contracts, they're actually getting more involved in strategic initiatives and business initiatives."

And it's not just businesses saving time. James Sandman, president of the Legal Services Corp., believes AI will be able to help legal consumers navigate another time-consuming task: finding legal information. "Historically, lawyers had a monopoly on legal information; you couldn't get legal information without going to a lawyer. Online resources have changed that, but it's still very difficult for a person who isn't a lawyer to locate the relevant and most helpful information that they need."

He notes that an early Google search provided tons upon tons of information, but not in any given order. A current legal search is the same—but similar to how Google has updated its ranking algorithms, so too will legal research for consumers. "You put in a search, and you'll get information from Reddit, you'll get stuff from other states that isn't relevant to what you need, you'll get old stuff that's outdated," Sandman explains. "It's overload, and it's also going to be unreliable. … [AI] is by definition a filtering mechanism that gives you smart, intelligent information that's relevant, current and accurate."

It may not be a concrete answer to the access to justice issue, he says, but it helps. And indeed, when it comes to technology in the next decade, "it helps" may be exactly what's needed.

EDRM's Mack has seen legal tech's progression as linear in her three decades in e-discovery. "I think it's been one foot in front of the other." But even if improvement on and adoption of TAR happened slow to her, there remains surprises. Maybe something will occur with structured data in a way that nobody thought of, she says, or a new technological tool. And if applied right, "Those technologies are more poised to be exponential."