Last week’s Legal ConFex in New York brought together In-house Counsel, Law Firm Partners, Legal Tech Vendors and Service Providers to discuss todays’ challenges in litigation, new regulations, eDiscovery, technology and software.
In the opening keynote “Artificial Intelligence & Digital Technology” – The Drivers for Change”, Michael Miller, President of the New York State Bar Association, addressed the obligation of legal professionals to stay up to date about technological systems and their features. “As always, technology moves faster than the law”, he stated and it is the responsibility of the legal professionals to be knowledgeable of the latest technology. This includes a basic understanding of the “what and where” of Artificial Intelligence in the legal profession.
As the conference continued, others agreed with the notion that the digital age comes with new responsibilities. Technology is constantly revolutionizing eDiscovery and staying up to par with the latest development is essential to adequately deal with today’s litigation challenges.
You do not have to be a Data Scientist
This does not mean we all need to have data scientist in our firms or law departments. Most legal technology solutions are intuitive and with a little training, ready to use in the legal practices. The challenge apparently lies in that “staying up to par” part.
Even at the Legal ConFex that offers a dedicated Law & Technology track, it is surprising to find so many legal professionals still unaware of the benefits from automation for the legal business processes. Pre-selecting data for eDiscovery, investigations, requests from supervisors or lawsuits; gathering relevant data and identifying problems when compiling a data room for corporate transactions; if done manually all time consuming and, more often than not, costly tasks when outsourced to external service providers.
Even with respect to the recently implemented GDPR (one of the key topics of the conference), technology is available to avoid that your team manually has to anonymize or pseudonymize data when information needs to be transferred from subsidiaries in the EU for requests related to litigation, arbitration or regulatory agencies.
Technology can do that much better
The use of intelligent technology makes your legal department smarter, better, more efficient and cost-effective. Legal Counsel already know that. Just listen to Adam, Senior eDiscovery Analyst at FirstBank, in the latest ACEDS webinar where he discusses how more eDiscovery processes completed in-house, his legal department became more cost effective with ZyLAB CSO, Johannes Scholtes, and Mary Mack from ACEDS.
If you want to know more about how you can use technology to optimize the processes in your legal department, please contact us. Do you want to experience ZyLAB’s technology for free? Sign up for a free test account.