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The vast repertoire of privacy issues facing law firms and other industries today has opened the door to a wide variety of compliance-centric business and product opportunities in the legal tech marketplace. It's a void that everyone from startups to law firm tech labs has rushed to fill, but could tech titans such as Microsoft and Amazon wind up being the Goliath to their David?

Case in point, speech-to-text service Amazon Transcribe rolled out a new feature last month that automatically hides personally identifiable information from call transcripts. A few weeks later, Microsoft announced its Data Protection/Privacy Mapping Project that shows how privacy laws around the world line up.

Those likely won't be the last steps that either company—or other large tech companies—take into the larger privacy world. Tomu Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Parsons Behle Lab, expects Amazon and Microsoft to continue looking for ways to emphasize privacy given how prevalent those concerns remain in the minds of consumers.

"We're likely going to see Microsoft and Amazon start competing for people by providing more privacy and security products. That's likely going to happen soon, if not already," Johnson said.

The same basic strategy will likely be deployed by other tech companies looking to assuage customers. Debbie Reynolds, founder of the data privacy-focused business Debbie Reynolds Consulting, expects other widely used corporate products such as Slack to continue baking in their own proactive privacy measures moving forward.

"Companies that build in functionality within existing tools that help me as a customer be able to pull out information on an individual person basis are probably going to get my money. They are going to get my business because this is my problem, and they are helping me solve a problem without having to go boil the ocean or pull in another tool to do that," Reynolds said.

For instance, a law firm already using various Microsoft products such as Office 365 may benefit from having privacy compliance tools or measures pre-incorporated into the software. Johnson at Parsons Behle Lab believes that the ubiquity of Amazon or Microsoft products across business environments and functions gives them a competitive advantage.

"I could foresee a situation where because you are using Microsoft and they secured your single sign-on and your access directory, it's very easy for them to also sync into all the different data bunkers that you have and then provide an assessment of which data privacy regulations apply to your workflows," Johnson said.

However, this doesn't necessarily mean that radical changes are ahead for smaller privacy-focused startups or companies in the legal tech space. While products belonging to large-scale tech companies may encompass much of the typical work environment, the issues and complications raised by various privacy laws around the globe—think the General Data Protection Regulation or California Consumer Protection Act—are widespread enough that no one solution may be able to address them all.

Chris Babel, CEO of the privacy compliance service TrustArc, believes that many users are taking a best-in-breed approach to their needs, meaning they select the tool that works best for a specific niche privacy need. In other words, there's room for many different providers at the table.

After all, even players the size of Amazon or Microsoft can't master every conceivable aspect of privacy compliance, and smaller companies looking to compete can always broaden their portfolio of solutions through partnerships. "Different people focus in different ways and bring different philosophies to the table, and so a lot of those solutions end up being great partnerships for small companies like us versus the Microsofts or Amazons of the world," Babel said.