The Middle East is just picking up on wave around legal tech which has been in flowing the UK and European legal markets for some time now. Indeed, with the initiatives taken by the MENA governments to boost innovation, the pace of change in Legal Tech has been accelerating. As is the case of most new age technologies with buzzwords and hype, myths and misconceptions are bound to arise and Legal Tech is no different. We are here to debunk and demystify some of these in this article.
MYTH 1: Cloud-based contract automation and storage is expensive – making their costs unjustifiable
There’s a lot to unpack in this one. Firstly, a cloud-based contract management application usually comes with a pricing plan that is based on an annual or monthly license fee. These license plans are usually scalable, since they are based on the number of users. So, you can decide how many users from your business need the license and only pay for usage. This works out more economical than an on-premises solution, which usually involves purchasing software and server costs.
There are also several other costs involved with on-premises installations such as the cost of hiring IT professionals to train internal staff and maintain the software. Not to mention, if software updates surpass the current hardware in use, software redundancy risks arise. In such a situation, the only option is to invest in compatible infrastructure so as to continue using the software.
MYTH 2: A.I. may reduce workloads and result in Legal job losses
A.I. driven contract automation technologies assist legal teams to accomplish high volume- low-value tasks. These tasks are essentially just time-consuming and add little value to client experience. Some may argue that lawyers use the billable hour system so getting a solution that reduces hours of work to minutes reduces their profitability. But it is actually quite the opposite. By speeding up the turnaround of these high-volume tasks, law firms can increase their bandwidth to take on more clients. With more clients, law firms can offer better rates to clients and gain a competitive edge. Legal departments in companies can bring more efficiency and boost turnaround times and accelerate the contract lifecycle, ensuring the business activities don’t slow down just because they are ‘going through legal’.
Technology increases job satisfaction by enabling legal teams to focus on more strategic and stimulating work, letting AI take care of the grunt, repetitive tasks. All these factors work wonders to increase a legal team’s profitability. Plus, law firms and legal departments alike get to market their ‘innovativeness’ and mean it!
MYTH 3: Upskilling employees will be time-consuming
Legal teams may believe that adopting A.I. driven technologies would mean that their staff will have to undergo upskill training with steep learning curves. This assumes that most AI driven technology is specialized and complicated to use. The reality, however, is far from this. A good legal technology solution is user-friendly, intuitive, and easy to use. It also comes with a dedicated customer support, training modules and service for any issues that may crop up. As a result, if any, only inductive training is required so legal teams can derive maximum value from the product.
MYTH 4: Adopting cloud-based technology means putting firm/client data in jeopardy
It is no secret that legal teams deal with large volumes of sensitive information. Consequently, legal teams and law firms alike seem to have this misapprehension that partnering with external legal technology vendors means that the vendor will have access to their information at least at some level. This, once again is just not true. Reputed cloud-based legal technology service providers follow high standards of data security with end-to-end encryption and a single-tenant architecture that ensures that confidential client data is never shared with the vendor or its clients.
Conclusion
Adoption of A.I. and Automation in the Legal sector, where such tools are not usually used may seem daunting at first. But Legal Tech is an enabler that can bring tremendous benefits to legal teams. It facilitates digital transformation within the legal sphere to reduce process burden, enhance quality of work and improve services delivered to clients or business units within a company. With innovation at the government’s forefront, the time is ripe for legal tech to shine. Through this article, we hope to have debunked the existing misconceptions around legal tech so as to spread awareness of its benefits and increase adoption.
