The Third Wave of Legal Technology Transformation: Changing the What of the Legal Practice

As discussed in the first part of this article, there have been two waves of technological change that have impacted the legal industry. (The first wave focused on changing How lawyers perform certain tasks or activities they have always done, while the second wave was largely targeting Who was working in the law.) These first two waves mostly leveraged technology to replace high-volume, repetitive tasks, the types of tasks often performed by lower-paid workers in legal services—in many cases, the workflows in legal services that were least efficient, and hence most in need of optimization. This type of change, focused on optimization and efficiency, does not necessarily require technology. It often starts with business process optimization, but it is typically accelerated by leveraging technology.