One of the biggest challenges in LegalTech maturity is driving a great experience for their intended clients. Part of the challenge is the natural development of the technology, part of it is market adoption. On the tech development side, it makes sense that our current examples are all focused on making a normally laborious process efficient. This produces a big fish in a small pond situation where there is no market saturation as of yet and so early movers are seeing the benefits once they achieve small market share. However, once LegalTech reaches a level of maturity on their trajectory of growth they will cross over from pure software implementation into hardware implementations.
This is where we are:
This is what’s happening now:
This is what happens next:
This is what i’m talking about in this article:
As much as the profession we work in is information based, for the law to permeate the human experience we see its application into the physical. Traditionally, this was a piece of paper or a conversation or presentation in a court setting. Now, much of these aspects have had a chance to be tried in a digital format in the last few months. The entire chain of work and experience has tasted a digital version.
Another example: "Something out of nothing" was the first post I published in the Lab. People signed up, and receive a weekly post in their inbox which they view from their desktops, tablets, phones etc. My nascent idea became a form of communication driven by Substack technology, consumed on your devices. In the end the interaction experience needs to be facilitated by hardware. This is universal.
Several reasons for this:
This result follows the same path of the giant tech companies (software first, blended into hardware for a unified experience) such as Apple who arguably have set the trend for the last 10 years with their iPhone and iPad developments.
Emergent technologies focused on a superior digital experience, especially mobile and wireless. Some of these include:
VR becoming tether-less,
5G Bandwidth capabilities,
LiDAR applications to wearable and mobile tech,
Solid State battery technology,
V2X protocols,
Low orbit satellite mesh systems,
LoRaWAN protocol hardware,
Decentralized ledgers, smart contracts.
Current Market adoption and integration of behavior changing hardware in the home/workplace, particularly voice-based tech. How many people do you know who have a smart home speaker or TV with Google/Alexa built in? 🤔
For LegalTech companies
My advice is simple, see your product development as an experience for the client. Of course, the UX/UI is an important consideration, how it integrates in the ecosystem is a fundamental consideration. But these are often seen from a purely software perspective. I believe in the next 5 years we will start to see software companies start to focus on how their tech blends and bleeds into hardware. With that, I believe we will see the first few examples of considered hardware for legal practice that would take advantage of the hard work of both legal-tech software development (perhaps initially, AI/ML contract analysis) with hardware that could be deployed. This hardware may or may not be built by those same legal-tech companies (The tech industry leaves us with a pretty good spread of hardware to use) but in partnership with hardware developers.
For Lawyers and Law Firms
What’s the consideration for lawyers and law firms? of course, using LegalTech as designed for our own industry and evolving our business models to thrive in this future. But it also exposes new legal questions which will ultimately fall to well rounded lawyers who understand the tech, can explore the implications of the tech applied, provide advice and a service with client experience at the forefront.
If you want to stay relevant and prosperous now and in the future, get in touch below:
Quick Update
Took a bit of a break this week re-connecting with friends we can finally physically meet after getting over a cold. Spent a little more time with my wife and young son ❤
I appreciate all of you for your attention and wanted to take this chance to ask for your feedback 🙏
Reply to this email and tell me what you enjoy and what types of posts you’d like to see more of in the Lab.
I always want to add value, bring some diversity to the table and make you think about new and interesting ideas around the #futureoflaw.
I look forward to your responses 🤓
As always, the future of law is in our hands 🔥
Q.
Photo by Eddie Kopp on Unsplash