In recent years, we have witnessed significant advances made by Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms across all industrial and commercial fields, particularly in the legal sector, where growth is accelerating globally. In the field of law, the trend is towards redesigning law firm business models, where future lawyers will focus on the specialized value that makes them unique.
The use of new Legaltech technologies (such as FinBoot, Smart Contracts, Ejust, etc.) is already driving major changes in the legal landscape. Legaltech emerges as one of the fast-growing sectors in digital entrepreneurship and as a tool that will define the lawyers of the future, relieving them and their clients from bureaucratic procedures and guaranteeing reduced time investment in data compilation.
As a result, traditional legal practice and classic legal service models are being left behind, making way for a more sophisticated, agile, and practical approach in which investment in talent and technology plays a crucial role.
Law firms with greater talent diversification will offer a broader portfolio of professional services and use multidisciplinary and multicultural teams to address problems and provide solutions from a more comprehensive perspective. The rise of new legal service trends and the corporate transformation of law firms, including virtual services, is a reality in the near future.
This revolution in the legal world will also bring changes in academic training, professional profiles, and skills for legal professionals, who will have to adapt to a new reality where the influence of technology is increasingly present. They will need extensive knowledge of digital law, programming skills to seek solutions, and the ability to evaluate Legaltech tools that streamline their daily work and enable clients to conduct business quickly, securely, and effectively.
It will also change the image of law firms, challenging the traditional perceptions of formalism and sobriety that characterize them. This implies having digital platforms that go beyond merely describing corporate profiles and services, offering direct communication and services that provide a differentiated client experience, such as: i) virtual legal assistants, and ii) platforms with tools that allow clients to access information and receive expert assessments without needing to schedule or attend in-person appointments.
Several studies have been conducted where experienced lawyers were pitted against AI systems, tasked with analyzing contracts, identifying effective solutions, and assessing potential risks in transactions. The final results? This system reduced response times from up to eight days to just 15 minutes by AI; it minimized errors, improved decision-making effectiveness on viable solutions, and significantly reduced associated costs and fees.
These studies raise the question: will lawyers be replaced by machines and robots? In the short term, the world will continue to need lawyers, but we must be prepared for new AI trends in legal services, which will be different, more complex, and challenging. We are compelled to leverage the potential of AI-associated technologies to transform legal services and remain competitive in a cutting-edge market.