Handbook of Legal Tech

How will technology change the legal profession – for better or for worse? I seem to spend a lot of time trying to figure out the online portals that are designed to save money and trouble (presumably for the organisation, not the user). They often have webchat facilities, FAQs and helplines which disappoint. To use these portals you need passwords, user names and mobile phones for codes. Technology is not there yet.

This is an interesting book dealing with all that is new in the bewildering tech world.

Technology has much to offer in the disclosure stage of litigation by using keyword searches to locate documents. I was fascinated to read about an American case called Jones where a party disclosed the contents of their own client’s telephone, including every document saved on it, to the other party and not just the documents relevant to the litigation. (Who keeps important documents on their phone?) The case raised issues of whether the party, which had been sent the data, should own up and admit they had got access to everything on the phone.

The question for society and the profession is how far do we want to go? In the US, parties regularly use technology to research jurors, litigants, and lawyers and judges. You can get a report on how often each party has sued and what happened, the success rates of different courts, the jurors’ political and religious interests, and whether the judge is pro claimant or defendant. We do not have so many jury trials in this country and research like that would probably be illegal.  

I remember word processors that took up a whole office and the first mobile phones were not much smaller. Technology has its limits though. It is easy to make a mistake and send everything to the wrong person. Will tech free up lawyers to enjoy more free time? I doubt it.

David Pickup is a partner at Pickup & Scott Solicitors, Aylesbury