Embracing the Industrialisation of Law
Legal Industrialist and founder of Artificial Lawyer Richard Tromans thinks the law is entering its own Industrial Age – and it’s time firms embraced the change. As strategy and innovation consultant to the legal profession, Richard specialises in preparing firms for digital disruption, reorienting workforce and workflow as well as advising on what new legal services AI might offer. As the impact of technology picks up pace, Richard’s unique expertise has kept him very, very busy.
“It’s clear that the whole legal services market is changing now,” said Richard. “The adoption of legal tech that performs the work, the increased focus on data, work flow and document analysis, is changing the kind of things lawyers want to learn about.
“As a consultant who advises law firms on how markets change and what it will mean to them, the ‘New Wave’ of legal tech is a vital component of the picture I develop for my clients.”
For firms and lawyers, Richard sees two main benefits arising from legal innovation.
“The first is well-known: efficiency and productivity gains, which often help protect margins on process work. However, the more interesting benefit is adding new value. You see, AI tech can create new products and services for law firms to sell to clients – products and services clients may not have known existed or could be useful to them. This means legal tech is creating something new, not just automating basic work.”
However, the threat of legal innovation is the same posed by any major evolutionary leap – failing to adapt to this changing market scenario.
Surprisingly, Richard predicts low-level legal work – the bread and butter of paralegals – will not immediately cease.
“Paralegals will probably continue to grow in numbers, but this is the peak before the collapse,” observed Richard. “By the end of 2028, I would expect most paralegal roles to have gone. Paralegals at present are doing work that AI systems can do, but old practices die off slowly. I expect the use of paralegals to keep going for some years yet.
“Eventually the ‘penny will drop’ and clients will just refuse to pay for them, just as some clients have already started to refuse to pay junior associates for low level process work.
Richard recommends that the legal profession help paralegals to prepare for automation by re-skilling.
“We need to help create more hybrid roles, where lawyers work on innovation and tech, and where IT people focus more on how legal work is made, not just operational issues for technology,” said Richard. “We need to teach students about how legal tech applications work and what it means to them and their future clients.
“One could say we are moving away from manual processes into a new age – the Industrialisation of Law.”
To thrive amidst the Industrialisation of Law, it’s not essential, in Richard’s view, to be a coder.
“You do need to understand what ‘NLP’ – Natural Language Processing – and machine learning means. You need to be comfortable looking at data and understand how algorithms will be used in legal practice to make predictions.”
In other words, lawyers must attain a broad mastery of what technological tools are available and how they might interact with legal work.
“It’s about knowing how to leverage tools, rather than understanding how those tools are made,” Richard explained. “For example, a carpenter needs to know how to use their chisels, but they don’t need to know how their chisel was made.”
Richard praises the Centre for Legal Innovation (CLI) for provoking discussion and educational initiatives in this space.
“I’m based in the UK, so my view is only from afar, but from what I have learnt CLI looks like a brilliant endeavor that is focused on delivering exactly what the lawyers of the future will need to be part of this changing legal world,” Richard said.