The thing about myths is they’re so widely held, it’s easy to assume they’re true. Who among us has never heard that coffee stunts your growth? Or believed that gum stays in your stomach for seven years if you swallow it? Or warned against swimming after eating? These myths have all been debunked, yet some people continue to believe them. This, unfortunately, is also the case for legal tech.
For example, many people both inside and outside of the industry believe that legal is still lagging in tech adoption behind other “more advanced” industries, that legal’s job is too vast to track with software, and that AI will eliminate the need for lawyers — despite none of these being true.
So, we’ve decided to debunk three common myths about legal technology.
Myth #1: AI will replace lawyers.
There’s a long-held misconception that one day, AI will grow so sophisticated that it’ll be able to take over lawyers’ jobs. While this fear is understandable, it’s pure fiction. AI can parse large volumes of text, summarize findings, and generate predictions based on trends, but without the capacity for nuance, AI can’t do a lawyer’s job better than a lawyer.
Instead, AI is a welcome support for overburdened legal teams. Instead of taking your job, AI helps you to do it better by sorting and analyzing your contracts. Plus, AI still needs a human to authenticate its responses, so it won’t be making autonomous choices anytime soon.
Myth #2: Small legal teams don’t need CLM.
Since many legal teams are often the smallest in the organization, it wouldn’t be accurate to say small legal teams don’t need CLM. Sure, when you’re starting out, spreadsheets can accomplish the job fine enough. But as the business scales and the legal team remains comparatively small, legal technology like CLM helps you to do more with less.
In fact, small teams have a lot to gain from using CLM. Lean legal teams often have low capacity given how much there is for so few of you. But CLM can increase your team’s bandwidth by taking the more tedious, manual processes off your plate.
Myth #3: It’s impossible to keep track of everything legal has to do.
There’s a simultaneous belief that legal technology can do all things and that it still isn’t enough for legal’s workload. Some even believe that legal’s tasks are too complex and their collaborators are too varied for the team to effectively track and manage their workload using legal technology.
While there is no single tool to manage every single item on legal’s agenda, legal project management software can help teams keep track of all kinds of tasks — not just contracts. Legal project management tools help you monitor your legal portfolio, prioritize tasks, and assign them across your team.
Takeaways
There’s a lot of fiction out there about legal technology – about whether or not AI can take your job, the benefits of CLM for legal teams, and just how helpful project management is for legal. The important thing to remember is that legal technology is a powerful assistant for lean, overburdened, and ambitious legal teams alike. With the right processes and a thorough understanding of use cases and best practices, legal technology can bring your team into the 22nd century.
