Automation

This week, DoNotPay, a site that helps people with legal issues ranging from fighting parking tickets to helping with asylum applications announced it has added 1,000 chatbots to assist with a wider range of legal forms.  For those unfamiliar with the chatbot it is simply a program that helps a person using dialogue and conversation to accomplish a tasks like customer service.  Chatbots are also used in digital assistants like Siri and in major messaging platforms (Facebook, WeChat).

While Legal Decoder doesn't compete in the same market as DoNotPay it is part of the same movement of creating legal technology products that automate tasks to help customers with decision-making.  Even though DoNotPay claims to be "the world's first robot lawyer" it isn't a lawyer and A.I. isn't replacing lawyers right now.  There is still a need for lawyers to provide guidance to clients or in-house counsel to manage the legal matters of a company.  Technology won't replace these people but it can help make them more effective at their jobs.  These technologies, including ours, provide to the user with more information and insight by doing the heavy lifting in the background through automation.

Technological innovation isn't going away in the legal industry.  Law firms and corporate legal departments are adopting technologies to help automate tasks such as matter management and billing review.  LegalZoom and Cooley created products where anyone at any time can generate a legal document for a matter.  More and more technology will be introduced into the legal market.  It's just a matter of figuring out which one works for you.