It is no secret that the legal industry, like many others, has undergone significant and unprecedented change in 2020.

In all of this, technology has emerged as a beacon for law firms and in-house teams around the globe, allowing them to work seamlessly from their new working environments, cut costs and drive efficiency in every aspect of their legal service delivery. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one technology that has come to the fore this year, not least due to the massive challenges posed by regulatory change, such as Brexit, the transition from LIBOR and the evolution of new and increasingly complex data protection provisions. In order to keep pace with the increasing volume of documents in the review pile, one thing is clear: Lawyers can't go into 2021 without the assistance of AI.

Let's take the example of data protection regulations: In the EU, over 220 fines were handed out to firms for GDPR non-compliance in the first ten months of 2020, showing the regulation is far from toothless. Indeed, with Google's record 50 billion Euro fine, countries and regions are showing an increasing tendency to take on big players who flout local laws.  Yet whilst there are a lot of challenges that may keep corporate executives up at night, failing to comply with data protection regulations should not be one of them. Next-generation AI is able to help businesses avoid hefty penalties and fines by helping lawyers to quickly identify areas within contracts or policies that are non-compliant with data privacy regulations. Moreover, the rise in subject access requests (SARs) can be tackled head-on with AI tools that can surface (and if necessary, redact) personally identifiable information within vast datasets at the click of a button.