Technology

Legal Tech In 2018: Could This Be The Year That Biglaw Strikes Back?

Is your firm working on something innovative? It better be if it wants to keep up with the competition.

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2018 will be the year I return to law firms

It’s been a long time coming. In 2013, I left my law firm to launch a startup and then (quite by accident) started writing about the new wave of legal tech startups in 2014. At that point, legal tech and innovation were not nearly as sexy as they are today. I used to see a major dip in traffic if I wrote about legal tech, but that is no longer the case. Since 2014, I’ve tried to cover not just the emerging startups, but the more established companies as well. I didn’t limit myself to tech and made sure to highlight alternative legal service providers (or LPOs or law companies or whatever they’re calling themselves) as well as innovative in-house departments.

But you know who I did NOT write about? Law firms.

In my naïveté, and having been a frustrated Biglaw associate myself, I saw the law firms as the exact opposite of innovation — in my mind they were the slow moving Mesozoic target of disruption. AI, machine learning, and robots were going to do to law firms what Netflix did to Blockbuster or what Amazon did to Borders (remember Borders?). Even as I deep-dived into the legal industry, my impression of “law firm innovation” was that it was mostly bullshit, a desperate attempt at PR, or both. Law firms wanted to be seen as innovative, but they didn’t actually want to be innovative.

We are now reaching a tipping point and I expect more firms to embrace real, sustainable innovation. I don’t have any cute data points, I’m basing this only my own experience and direct conversations. There are certainly firms (my bet is that it’s still the majority) that are simply waiting and doing nothing — and this may very well work out for them. Sure, technologies like Luminance and Heretik allows large numbers of documents to be reviewed much more efficiently, and a platform like Doxly transforms the process of managing any corporate transaction. But, if your clients aren’t asking for it, why make the purchase — especially when these platforms will prima facie reduce your billable hours?

But adopting technology is just the beginning, and purchasing technology alone does not an innovative law firm make. The innovative firms I’m talking about have recognized that they can be leaders in legal technology and next generation legal services. Consider the startups I mentioned above as an example: Slaughter & May reportedly has an equity stake in Luminance, Heretik has an investment from a firm in the Am Law 100 (you heard it here first), and Doxly has an investment from Dentons’ Nextlaw Labs. Not to be outdone, Allen & Overy and Mishcon de Reya are running legal tech accelerators and Orrick recently hired Jackson Ratcliffe, who had been consulting, to be the technical lead for Orrick Labs. Holland & Knight has a robust innovation committee made up of a cross section of the lawyers who are tasked not only with identifying cutting edge tech that they bring to the firm’s attention, but also with coming up with a sustainable implementation strategy.

And this is all just tip of the iceberg stuff.

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That’s why in 2018, I’m going back to the law firm. Law firms have significant resources, an unparalleled development environment, and direct access to clients — how many tech companies can say that? The reason that I’m betting law firms are going to embrace innovation is that there is a clear market opportunity for those that do, and I believe in efficient markets. That’s why, even though I’m still suffering from Legalweek sleep exhaustion, I will be heading all the way back from Tel Aviv to Scottsdale for the ALT Conference (ALT is short for Association of Legal Technologists) starting this Sunday. If Legalweek is the big event of the year where tech companies get to woo law firms with their new shiny stuff, the ALT Conference is an intimate gathering of law firm decision makers who want to use design thinking to implement innovation inside a law firm. I’m betting that some of the next big ideas in legal are going to originate inside law firms and at gatherings like the ALT Conference, and I don’t want to miss out.

I’m going to be writing about this a lot in 2018, so, if your firm is working on something innovative, I’d love to hear more on or off the record — email me or connect with me on LinkedIn. Going to be at ALT? Email me and let’s set up a time to meet. Want to follow my conversations with innovative legal influencers? Drop your email in below.

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Zach Abramowitz is a former Biglaw associate and currently CEO and co-founder of ReplyAll. You can follow Zach on Twitter (@zachabramowitz) or reach him by email at zach@replyall.me.

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