Legaltech: All you need to know

Legaltech: All you need to know

Legaltech is a legal technology that can be defined as the implementation of online law that offers companies and individuals a digital offer with a greater use of automation and digital dematerialization technologies.

This new model of online law, which is based on technological innovation, is developed with the idea of smoothing out many of the problems derived from the traditional practices of professionals such as lawyers or notaries through the resources of new technologies.

Although its arrival has been perceived by part of the sector as a real threat to traditional legal services, legal technology nevertheless remains an added value for all legal professions. In fact, many of the Legaltech firms have law firms among their clients.

The purpose of legal technology.

As new players in the legal field, the objectives of legal technology are quite clear. For this new generation of companies, the aim is to offer fully digital solutions for the democratisation of administrative and legal procedures for the benefit of small businesses and individuals. To position themselves, these actors rely on digital dematerialisation and automation technologies.

However, there are other values that allow these start-up companies in online law to stand out from the traditional players: security, availability, accessibility and ease of use. These Legaltech have a recognized experience in offering automatic generation of legal documents at a relatively low cost.  They also use algorithms to produce legal documents that are highly reliable for other simple operations. These platforms specialised in online services related to law also allow their clients, whether individuals or SMEs, to benefit from support and often even complete management of the procedures to be carried out.

As a rule, the documents concern specific areas of consumer law, individual relations in labour law, entrepreneurship, Internet law and much more. Legaltech also aims to ensure intelligent and above all personalised legal control.

What does Legaltech allow in the field of law?

This innovation is going to allow a series of options that are going to speed up the professional practices in the sector as far as:

• The automatic generation of legal documents (creation of companies, drafting of non-complex contracts, etc.).
• The dissemination of legal information (chatbot, information system, etc.).
• The connection with legal professionals (mainly in BTC).
• The statistical analysis of court decisions (contracts and other documents), thanks to the development of artificial intelligence, partly called “predictive justice”.
• Dispute resolution (referral platform, arbitration, mediation).

Regulation

The advent of legal technology is fairly recent at the global level. This means that regulation adapted to these new actors in legal services has not yet been considered. However, the ethical rules to be respected by these new companies are being considered.

We can therefore hope that in a few years’ time texts will be adopted that take account of the practices of these new players in order to avoid unfair competition with the traditional professions in the sector, such as lawyers or notaries.

In the meantime, these new players must comply with the rules in force, particularly as regards competition from regulated professions such as the legal profession.