30 Years of Legal Tech Innovation: How Law Firms Work Smarter & Faster
Advances in technology have dramatically changed the way the legal profession operates. Digital transformation of law practices and courts has evolved greatly since the internet email became ubiquitous and cloud computing changed the way we store and access content and data.
Catalysts for change include the tech boom in the 1990s, when start-ups and technology entrepreneurs began to transform the legal landscape. The Covid-19 pandemic that shut down public spaces in 2020 forced courts and law firms to figure out how to work remotely helped to accelerate the adoption of new tools and processes.
As recently as 30 years ago, many tasks that attorneys and law firms performed regularly, such as filing court briefs, tracking billable hours, and serving subpoenas, were still done in person or by hand, slowing down legal processes and requiring many working hours to accomplish.
Though law school graduates and paralegals new to the job market probably can’t imagine a world without case management software and the digital tools they use every day, some of the most pivotal innovations in legal tech have only been around for a relatively short time.
Here is a brief history of the most significant innovations in legal tech that highlight how smart law practices are moving toward greater efficiency with digital tools and platforms.
Document eFiling in Courts
One of the most revolutionary advancements in legal tech came with the ability to electronically file documents with the courts. The practice of law was forever transformed when eFiling eliminated the need for briefs and other legal documents to be filed in person and only when the brick-and-mortar court buildings were open for business.
A little history: In 1988, the Judicial Conference of the United States approved a digital service called PACER—Public Access to Court Electronic Records—which allowed everyday Americans who were approved to use the system to access the growing trove of electronic court records. By the late 1990s, Case Management / Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF), one of the first eFiling systems, had been created.
In addition to shortening the duration of court cases, online filing also freed up law clerks to spend more time doing important quality checks on documents or taking on larger caseloads. Not only does eFiling allow interested parties in a case to simultaneously review court documents in real time, it saves time and money. When filing online, there is no need to print, copy, and mail documents, and administrative professionals can focus on more meaningful matters.
Another benefit of eFiling is the reduction of errors. Software employed by many court systems perform content checks at the time of upload—catching issues early in the process, such as file formatting or missing materials that could lead to rejection.
The online eFiling process was so efficient that in 2012, the Federal Court of Appeals made it mandatory for filing in the Federal Circuit. The move to mandatory eFiling is likely to dominate, as more trial and bankruptcy courts require electronic transmission of case documents.
Electronic Discovery (eDiscovery) Software
The process of building a legal case used to require that attorneys dig through immense troves of paper records (think: floor-to-ceiling stacks of Bankers Boxes). They’d note evidence or pertinent information by using highlighters or sticky notes. But with e-mail proliferating in the 1990s, more and more documents were sent electronically.
The legal profession—and the courts—recognized that new technologies were needed to keep up with the digital age. The amount of electronically stored information (ESI)—website pages, emails, chat histories, text messages, and much more—was increasing exponentially.
Enter eDiscovery. In 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended to include ESI as part of the discovery obligation in court cases. Predictive coding and technology-assisted reviews made the discovery process much easier and faster. Software for eDiscovery, such as MatterSuite and Logikcull, among others, can review documents at lightning speed, distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant litigation discovery information.
Most recently in the early 2020s, these programs have included artificial intelligence (AI), allowing eDiscovery programs to be “trained” on sample documents within a specific corpus of case law so they’re able to detect more specific kinds of key information. AI may also be employed to generate deposition summaries and and provide analysis.
While human lawyers still have the last word on what information is most helpful to their cases, this technology accomplishes the review work in a fraction of the time it used to take.
Time-Tracking and Billing Software for Lawyers
Because most attorneys charge by the hour, keeping a record of how much time is spent per client or per case on a given day could be a major headache for lawyers. Before the legal tech boom really took off in the early 2000s, most attorneys tracked billable hours by jotting them down by hand or in a spreadsheet. Around 2006, with the advent of cloud-based computing, legal time-tracking and billing software began to gain traction.
New law practice management software, such as Clio, Smokeball, and MyCase, provided lawyers and law firms with the ability to not only to track billable hours, but also to generate customized client invoices at the push of a button anywhere there was an internet connection.
Today, some of these programs have advanced to include “passive time-tracking abilities,” that track the attorney’s online activities and prompt them to enter billing and time-keeping information if they fail to do so.
Legal Automated Case Management and Predictive Analytics in Litigation
New legal tech at the turn of the 21st century also began to include tools that could help with many case-management tasks, such as real-time database updates, automated document management and assembly, improved client communication tools, and much more.
Hand-in-hand with legal case-management systems, eDiscovery (mentioned above) helped give birth to the use of automated predictive analytics in the legal field. Until as recently as the 2010s, lawyers and their clients needed to rely mostly on the attorney’s “gut instincts,” as well as their reading of past case law or anecdotal information about a judge or opposing counsel, to try to predict the result in a particular lawsuit.
No longer. Machine learning (or artificial intelligence), can be used to recognize patterns and thereby create predictive analytics, are increasingly being used to help attorneys project the likely outcome of cases. Systems such as Lex Machina and Bloomberg Law can analyze hundreds of similar past cases and rulings, profiles of judges, and even behavioral patterns to forecast litigation outcomes. They can project “whether a case is likely to settle, win, or lose,” according to the American Bar Association website, and even suggest litigation strategies.
These platforms initially focused on Federal courts, but have more recently expanded to include state and local jurisdictions. Some can also be customized to the parameters of specific cases. Predictive analytics systems may help lawyers and firms decide how to proceed in a case—or whether to take it on to begin with.
Electronic Health Records
One of the most important and influential tech developments in the past 20 years that has impacted the legal world has been the creation of electronic health records (EHR).
Software designed to collect, update, and share a patient’s medical history, health information, medications came to market as early as the 1960s, but, in 2004, President George W. Bush opened the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and set a 10-year goal for most Americans’ health records to be digitized by 2014.
Since then, numerous HIPPA-compliant EHR software programs have been developed allowing for automated medical record management and paving the way for greater efficiency in legal proceedings. The impact has been especially notable in suits that involve claims of medical malpractice, personal injury, and healthcare law.
Faster retrieval of medical records helps expedite case preparation, the settlement process and litigation, and advances productivity for law firms.
Service of Process Software
Though the right to due process has been around since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 in England, the automation of this stage of litigation timeline came centuries later.
According to recent research, there are nearly 9,000 process servers employed in the U.S. whose job it is to work with law firms to deliver summonses, subpoenas, and other legal documents to those involved in cases. In the past 15 years, process serving has become faster and more efficient with the introduction of software and companies that vet their own networks of professional process servers.
Innovative software solutions such as our own keep track of each step, including case initiation, all attempts to serve a document through the affidavit (or confirmation) of successful delivery; assist law firms with task management; provide real-time reporting and job status, and enable users to communicate with process servers directly, all of which save time for .
Remote Testimony and Legal Videoconferencing
When the COVID-19 pandemic exploded in 2020 and locked down life as we knew it, the legal profession had no choice but to adapt. Videoconferencing for legal procedures had been allowed in limited situations prior to the pandemic, but with law firms, courts, and many businesses operating remotely, its use swiftly grew in popularity, allowing the wheels of justice to continue to roll forward.
Virtual hearings substantially improved the appearance rates for criminal warrant hearings, according to StateTech. Even the U.S. Supreme Court embraced the idea of virtual proceedings, temporarily approving its use in late March 2020.
Remote participation of judges, attorneys and support staff, and witnesses increases accessibility, lessens the hardship of travel, and saves time and money for all involved.
Some American courts have adopted hybrid policies that allow for hearings and trials to be conducted with some parties appearing in-person in the court and others participating remotely.
Each of these innovations have one goal in common: the efficiency of the practice of law. With trusted technology partners providing secure platforms that integrate with existing software and internal workflows, the solo practitioner, the corporate counsel, the global law firm can save time and money, and reduce the number of avoidable errors by adopting transformational tools made possible by today’s entrepreneurs.
