Discussion: What is Innovation in the Legal World?

Innovation, innovation, innovation…….the word that never stops getting mentioned these days in relation to the legal sector. There are even prize ceremonies for ‘Most Innovative Law Firm’. People hang entire conferences around the theme (for example the excellent and recent LawTech London meetup).

And there are good reasons for this. It reflects a deeply felt need to ‘do something’ about the way legal services are provided both by law firms and inhouse legal teams, as well as increasingly a new wave of ‘alternative legal providers’.

For a long while innovation used to be offering to unbundle some of the process work and refer it to another group of lawyers who could do it at a lower cost. Today, innovation is synonymous with legal tech, especially the New Wave of legal tech that includes legal AI and automation technologies.

But, how does this translate into real change? What is real innovation in a legal business? What does it look like? How does a firm make it happen?

And therein is the challenge. Innovation is a vague term. Are there any rules, is there any benchmark that we can judge this thing that people want to do so much?

Artificial Lawyer invites the good folk of the legal tech world to join in on the discussion using Reply All.

The discussion will run for several days, so please pop back from time to time to see how things are progressing. If you’d like to join in, please drop me a line.