Technology as a tool to respond to the legal challenges of the future

The closing session of the web series "Digital Transformation for the Legal Function" had as its main theme the technology for legal departments. It had the participation of leading leaders of the Latin American "legaltech" ecosystem, who reflected on current and future challenges, in the post-Covit-19 context.

At the event they exhibited Bibiana Martínez Camelo, Innovation Manager en LEGIS and Chapter Organizer Legal Hackers - Bogotá, Juan Manuel Haddad, Regulatory and Competition Affairs Manager en Telefónica Argentinawho were moderated by Andrés Rodríguez, Chief Commercial Officer in Lemontech. Andrés Jara, CEO of Alster He served as host of the session.

The webinar began with a reflection from Andrés Rodríguez on 2020 and this will be remembered as the year marked by digital transformation in any aspect of our lives. He indicated that today the massive use of technology opens up opportunities at the global level to improve everything we can imagine, including the legal sector.

After this introduction, Bibiana Martínez Camelo made a definition of legaltech, noting that it refers to the technological developments created to facilitate the provision of legal services generating efficiencies that impact the relationship with customers and that seek:

• Reduce or eliminate the need to consult a lawyer.
• Accelerate the tasks of a lawyer, reducing the labour force and / or number of hours required.
• Simplify and modify how to contact lawyers and customers.

The exhibitor presented the evolution of investments in the sector legaltech with a study by Forbes, indicating that investments of more than one USD 1 billion were made in 2018 alone, an increase of 731% over the previous year. With this he sought to demonstrate how this sector is taking strength and what comes to the future.

He also exhibited the maps of legaltech from Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina, in which it was possible to visualize local developments and the most used tools. Bibiana finished her presentation by commenting on the three main trends legaltech for the region:

1. investigation or predictive analysis of judgements to develop dispute strategies,
2. softwars that meet the challenges of legal operations; and
3. mechanical task automation tools in which the lawyer does not add value.

For his part, Juan Manuel HaddadHe shared his experience in developing technological tools for the legal area of Telefónica Argentina. He began his exhibition by presenting some numbers to graph that the most relevant in this process is to have data to make correct decisions.

He commented that in 2004 they began the process of transformation in order to solve the problems arising from the high volume of trials (6,000 per year), however, when analysing the data, they realized that the actual bottleneck was the 7,000 judicial offices that arrived on a monthly basis, of which 30 per cent were repetitive responses. This finding allowed them to develop low-cost solutions and not invest in something more complicated as artificial intelligence that could only have had a narrow scope for this particular problem.

Juan Manuel, He reported the phases that went through as a team and shared some Learning of this path:

• be very convinced of the project, as lawyers must be convinced to enter data without seeing short-term benefits,
• visualize the processes from point to point, not only when a topic comes in and out of legal, but at company level, and
• It is essential to integrate with company and supplier systems.

He closed his exhibition with a reflection on the disruption of technology in the way of providing legal services and in the business models of traditional providers. It is no longer about the lawyer as a central actor of this ecosystem, but about the legal services needs of individuals and organizations.

The webinar concluded with a question and answer session, where the exhibitors agreed that it is urgent to get in the car of technology and view this period of disruption as an opportunity to become the lawyer of the future, where the toolbox is not just the pencil and paper, but a computer full of softwars that allow you to run in 5 hours or even seconds what used to take 3 days.

Communications | Alster