It is not the idea to focus this article to the analysis of the challenges the legal sector is facing in recent years, since we know them enough. We will list the main ones: the difficulties of the legal sector to society as a whole understand and appreciate their role, saturation of the supply of legal services in the market, lack of adaptation of these services to the real needs of businesses and particular, the current political instability, lack of transparency of institutions, etc.
To solve most of these challenges, innovation is possibly the best answer hand to hand with technology. Innovation and technology, technology and innovation. This is the combination that a lawyer can no longer ignore.
First of all it is important to distinguish between invention and innovation. For the first one, only a few are endowed with the necessary capacity. The second one, almost everybody can.
It is important to break with the paradigms of the past, the lawyers of the new era needs to adapt, innovate, propose and offer more of what they have designed to offer. The typical image of the conservative and resistant to change jurist is at odds with this finding. A thirst for change, development, improvement… and justice is now seen in the whole world.
With this article, plus all the technological information, we provide the lawyer the help needed to build their tools, devise solutions and carry them out. No more talk of innovation and disruption. It’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Innovate is done from within. To innovate we must need to want it.
The Institute of Legal Innovation in Spain presents four key areas for technological innovation in the legal profession:
1. Open innovation: complete organization of sectoral hackathons for various legal groups, from the competition of ideas until the creation of the prototype; call and incubation of start-ups legal.
2. Training: to have a digital curriculum that guarantees all jurists a proper training to use technological tools for their profession. You need to be updated, know the technology and how to use it, search courses, master’s degrees and/or specializations that give you the legal training for use of technologists and IT professionals.
3. Research: knowledge of the current state of technology in the sector to avoid duplication and encourage the use of everything that adds value to the legal world, studies the situation of open data, studies on real issues, current and future uses of certain technological developments and their impacts, etc.
4. Dissemination and networking: network with other participants of the innovative legal sector, that apply technology, to learn from them and to teach them, that we move this innovative wave in every corner of the world, adapting our practice to the new legal era, technology and innovation.
For older generations, conservative and manual under the hand lawyers, it is normal to see this premise as crazy, but gradually the same market and the world are pushing us towards adaptation of the roots of our profession, opening to alternatives, offers and solutions for our cases in any area of the legal field. The important thing is the layout, always with the legal bulwark of justice, to adapt and begin to build the foundations of law in future generations.