So, where has the technology on the legal tech front gone so far? Actually, nowadays about 700 firms and startups have been counted worldwide, which are trying to play into the legal game and want to innovate the legal market. The main problem of all these companies is, that all the different steps of legal consultations are very hard to put in a single algorithm. This theory is also supported by the fact, that all the different startups focus on just one or two operating areas of the legal consultation.
I. First of all, there is ROSS, the highly complex legal database system which is working on the ground of WATSON, the competent artificial intelligence system built by IBM.WATSON. A similar software, DEEP BLUE, from IBM already defeated the world's chess champion Kasparov back in 1997. So, now IBM is challenging the worlds best lawyers!
II. The second fragment of the legal process, which seems to be very lucrative for new firms, is the so calles "Online Dispute Resolution". The important thing to understand is, that taking help from a provider in an online dispute way can be very consumer-friendly. Some of these services do not take money from the consumers, until the case is finally "won". Only in that case, the provider gets something like a provision. This way of legal help is much faster and more efficient for the consumer than going to a normal lawyer. So this fragment of the legal work will be formalised and simplified even more in the next few years.
III. The third group of startups focus on providing online legal documents to the customers. This makes it much easier to do a part of a lawyers work on your own, so it is also really lucrative for the people.
IV. And finally there are a lot of new firms, which develop "Legal Practice Management Solutions" by using automation processing, which is e.g. cloud-based and can be easily used by every law firm so far.
In this post I wanted to show you, that there are different fragments of legal consultation which different startups focus on. Just tell me in a comment, which of the four groups I should introduce more precisely in the next post.
steem regards!
your: Legal Tech Expert.