How the Legal Industry is Getting more Technology Driven

The legal industry in India is a mysterious market that even its regulators don’t seem to have good grip on. The number of students for the law profession is increasing. From completing legal research and billings to document reviews and assembly, including project management had not evolved from much older methods for the past few years.

These tasks require a huge amount of a lawyer’s time, and since the most preferred format used by lawyers is hourly billing, that time costs their clients’ tremendous amounts of money. Recently, there has been a surge in the explosion of tools enhancing the way lawyers run their practices. The CEO of Vakilsearch, Hrishikesh Datar gives us insight into what changes this industry is seeing by moving into the digital age.

1. Innovation:

Today, the word ‘technology’ is a broad concept than people tend to think it is. It is the application of knowledge of and to the world allowing people to affect their environment by controlling or modifying it. A known fact is that technological innovation makes consumers want new types of products, thereby having businesses adjust their operations to meet these new market demands. Businesses then integrate new technologies into their daily operations; production cycles and provides new products.

Driven by a consumers desires for more convenient services, businesses compete with each other based on their pace of innovation and adoption of new technologies. This leads to a state where there will be constant innovation, which in turn helps the industry and the economy grow.

2. Productivity:

India is a young nation, one where there is tremendous amounts of talent and ideas that the youth want to put into action. The youth of the country is also very tech savvy, wherein they want to see results as efficiently and as effectively as possible, making them lean more towards unconventional methods to see these results. This is why we now see a drive to boost technological advancements by government bodies in India as well.

There are already a number of legal start-ups in India that provide users with a host of different services,  from helping to find a lawyer to completing the legal documentation process, this industry is moving towards making the process streamlined, efficient and cost effective.

Through improving processes to developing worker skills, it leads to product developments; technology increases the productivity of business operations. Online customer service options, customer support pages etc, reduce the need for personal attention and increase the productivity in these areas without entirely sacrificing the customer experience.

3. Acceleration:

Due to online data transfers in the ever-changing technology world, new businesses operations tend to move ahead at a faster acceleration rate once the difficult part of incorporating and correctly obtaining all the required legal documentation. Some online legal service portals offer clients innovative options to complete these tasks quickly, such as making payments via EMIs.

 From an operations perspective, technological acceleration forces companies to move faster to meet consumer demands by providing the tools for them to do so. India has seen a large number of start-ups cropping up across the country in this past year, and this number will continuously keep moving higher after the recent launch of the government’s new policy, ‘Start-Up India’.

Some start-ups have entered the scene with an extremely focused and customer centric approach to streamline processes between lawyers, legal documentation and clients. From a client’s perspective, this is great news because it drives down their legal costs. In an industry where time is quite literally money, we see that the more there is innovation in this industry, the more there will be an accelerated growth for the legal industry and for the start-up ecosystem.

Image from here.