If you could dream up any Legal Tech solution, what would it be?
Here are 11 intriguing legal tech ideas dreamt up by lawyers for lawyers.
Recently, I gave a keynote talk at ALTACON, the Australian Legal Tech Association Conference held in Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne is one of my favourite cities for a few reasons — people are very open and friendly, the city exudes culture and arts, the food is some of the best you will find worldwide…and it is my hometown where I was born and raised (so yes, I am bias).
Melbourne is also home to a growing scene of legal technology start-ups and ventures. ALTACON is one of Australia’s largest legal tech conferences, creating a day for legal tech experts from the industry to showcase their products, services and recent initiatives as well as for legal professionals to learn more about legal tech.
My keynote focussed on the relationship between design in legal technology and how they both play a role in the future of the legal industry. When talking to large audiences, I usually like to include an interactive activity that requires their participation. It’s interesting to tap into the minds of the people in the audience — I find that I always take home some new learning, perspective or idea from doing this.
In this keynote, I decided to pose this question to a room of 100+ legal professionals:
“If you could dream up any legal tech solution, what would it be and why?”
Out of 90 or so responses, here are 11 ideas for legal tech solutions that lawyers would love to have and that the team at Observ found most intriguing:
1. A babel fish that interprets legal jargon for everyday people
2. Lori, your legal Siri
3. A bot that can point a lawyer in the right direction for legal research
4. Entirely virtual courtrooms, to streamline processes and costs and increase convenience for everyone
5. An AI Sanity Check, for every lawyer to run their arguments by to check for soundness and coherence prior to presenting in court or in a negotiation
6. Absolute verification of all identities
7. A tool to measure the likelihood of winning or losing a litigation
8. Trade tech, which provides trade rules to rural farmers before exporting their goods
9. A paperless industry…here’s hoping!
10. Specially designed collaboration platform for lawyers and non-lawyers to solve legal problems together
11. Holographic lawyer that is there for you at your time of need. Includes multi-lingual features and is accessible to all.
For all the legal technologists out there, feel free to bring one, two, five or all of these ideas to life. Just remember to design it well, to really serve the needs of the intended users. Do this, and I can guarantee that lawyers around the world will be thanking you and lining up for your product.
