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Digital Darwinism: an era of opportunity for legal technology

22 November 2019 | Luminance

The expression ‘Digital Darwinism’ has been floating around for some time now. Coined by the consumer expert, David Solis, ‘Digital Darwinism’ is where society and technology are evolving faster than organisations are adapting. In a fast-paced and competitive legal climate, leveraging legal technology has never been so valuable, or so necessary. Law firms and organisations that do not invest in technology solutions risk being left behind.

Technology as a catalyst for change

With the new dawn of Digital Darwinism, gone are the days of ‘business as usual’, instead we are in a new era of consistent value for clients and changing business for the better. Central to this, is innovative legal technology.

But ‘innovation’ has often been seen as a buzzword for law firms and organisations who are trying to build and maintain relationships with their clients. As a result, innovating through technology has got muddled along the way, with legacy technology vendors forcing lawyers to compromise the legal process through a resource-intensive, extraction-based approach. Lawyers were required to invest valuable time in training and configuration before they saw any meaningful results. These systems are no longer fit for the needs of the modern-day lawyer and their clients. As legal technology becomes essential to continue operations, organisations need to move away from outdated technology systems and instead deploy platforms that better reflect how the real world is evolving and the needs of their clients.

True innovation

By bringing true innovation to the legal profession, Luminance ensures advisors are meeting the demands of their clients in a fast-moving landscape. This is all made possible by Luminance’s core technology, LITE (Legal Inference Transformation Engine), which uses a unique blend of supervised and unsupervised machine learning to read and understand huge volumes of data from any language and any jurisdiction, at accelerated speeds. The intuitive interface is able to immediately organise the data room, clustering the information at document and clause level. As LITE learns from the interactions it has with the lawyer, the review process accelerates even further, with LITE refining its understanding and proactively suggesting and tagging new concepts. Legal advisors are therefore provided with unparalleled insight into the dataset at hand, uncovering and exposing areas of risk and importance, and ensuring advisors never feel out of step in their review.

The Network Effect

In an age of Digital Darwinism, adopting legal technology is the new normal. Multinational firms with innovation teams have been the first to capitalise on the insight legal technology brings to their daily practice. However, the ease in which Luminance can be deployed means that the size and reputation of a firm no longer gives these firms a competitive advantage. Challenger firms seeking to innovate means that the legal sector is becoming more of a level playing field. This is nowhere clearer than the Nordic law firms, renowned for their use of legal technology to improve legal services. The rate of adoption in these regions has meant that firms and organisations must capitalise on legal technology in order to continue to deliver to their clients. Indeed, with all of the ‘The Big Four’ accounting firms also all using legal technology to provide more efficient and better legal services, traditional law firms are forced to reconceptualise their business models to keep up with an evolving, technological landscape.

New era of legal AI

The new advent of Digital Darwinism highlights the need for organisations to look beyond the legal world as they know it. Using Luminance, firms and companies are entering a brave new world of digital legal, allowing them to get to the meat of the deal with speed and with insight never previously thought possible.