When Lehman Brothers collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis, Jason Boehmig lost his job at the US investment bank.
After law school he did a stint as a technology lawyer at Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West, while studying coding at the weekends, and concluded that properly designed tech could change how lawyers approach contracting. “Technologists, when they made software for lawyers, didn’t get it — and lawyers didn’t really use technology because it wasn’t what they wanted,” he says.
that legal tech companies had topped $1bn in venture capital investments in the nine months to September 2021, beating the previous high of $989mn in 2019.by LawtechUK, a government-backed initiative to help modernise legal services, found that regulatory compliance and legal document management attracted the most cash. It estimated that greater use of digital technology by legal service providers could bring them overall productivity gains worth up to £1.7bn annually.
Jerry Ting, co -founder and chief executive of US-based Evisort, is one beneficiary of the enthusiasm for legal tech. His company, which uses AI to help digitise the contracting process and then organise and analyse the data, announced a $100mn in fundraising in May. He argues that lawtech start-ups have a future in their own right. “Before now, the attitude was that you might build a business with a couple of million dollars of revenues and then sell it to one of the big incumbents,” he says.
She cites the pressure on companies after western governments imposed sanctions on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in February. US-based Luminance client IDEXX Laboratories was able to review all its contracts quickly to assess its contractual ties to sanctioned entities. Working out its exposure to Russia took about half an hour, using the tool, compared with potentially weeks without it, Lightbody says.
Because lower order legal work will soon be completed by software and AI rendering swathes of young lawyers in commercial firms an expensive luxury. Job losses are already occurring although the magic circle corporates are paying higher and higher salaries for the very best grads
Interesting story...
Because if they poured money in illigal companies they would be in shits creek.
well for one, its Probabyl easier than pouring money into illegal technology,
Because they can’t pour it into illegal technology?