Issuance of Rial Payment Cards for Foreigners
23 May 2023
Iran Appoints Ambassador to UAE as Part of Continued Efforts to Strengthen Relations with Persian Gulf States
30 May 2023

Use of Technology in Legal Professions

Date: 05 March 2023


 


When discussing use of technology in legal professions, electronic payment methods and client portals are the very first examples that come into mind. A significant part of the customer relationship is related to the experience that the client receives by cooperating with a law firm or an individual lawyer; these methods can be one of the top reasons why a customer chooses you to work with.

Legal tech and especially artificial intelligence can make accurate evaluations of all relative documents. This has led to a $ 50,000 increase in lawyers’ annual revenue; the same applies to that of law firms which experienced a 20% growth compared to the previous year while the firms that didn’t utilize technology in providing legal services, made 8% less than the former.

As mentioned earlier, some of the cases of using technology in legal industry are related to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and how to make the workflow more efficient and profitable. CRM software help staying in touch with clients and building trust towards them. It also helps lawyers keep their data records organized and up to date. By eliminating inefficiencies in the follow-up process, CRM enables law firms to streamline the tasks that would otherwise require tedious work.

Besides, lawyers’ working lifestyle has not changed much since the outbreak of COVID-19. It is true that many lawyers were forced to set up their offices at home but legal professions adapted to the digital environment by facilitating working from home and relying on telecommunications for meetings during the pandemic. While still in the recovery phase of quarantine, in July 2022, lawyers only spent 12 days in office which is one day less than other professions, and surprisingly, only 29% of law firms’ staff worked exclusively from office.

Since then, remote work has become a routine for 44% of firms. These numbers show a new lifestyle for medium-size law firms. It is worth noting that over a third of the clients prefer virtual meetings with their lawyers.[1] Even before the pandemic, there had been a growing interest among those in the legal sector in more work location flexibility. These workplace location shifts and technology facilitations have created an opportunity for the foregoing firms to increase their revenue on a large scale. The staff is now able to use AI-based platforms to spend fewer hours in office and make document preparations more accurately. According to AI-based service platforms statistics, artificial intelligence implications have made contract reviews faster by 90% and document evaluations by 30% to 90%. However, this revolutionary change in daily work routine has recorded a side effect; it causes a work-life line blur. This is significant since 37% of the lawyers left their jobs in 2022 for a better work-life balance which is just important as the most common reason that caused them to do so – higher payment.

Another legal trend is what is called "ChatGPT" which is a free service presented by the Open-AI research company. It provides a question-based search experience that remembers your previous questions, estimates your interests and makes suggestions upon them. It learns from human feedback and admits its mistakes.

Use of this recently introduced platform is yet to be examined and it also needs to be trained in legal sector, but it provides the capability to extend the limitations of tech implications in the legal industry and revolutionize it in various ways, even replacing lawyers in some aspects of legal work such as conducting research and drafting documents.