More than 60% of Spanish companies have not incorporated legaltech solutions

In Spain, companies have not yet taken advantage of the full potential offered by legaltech solutions to improve their legal departments. In fact, according to a report by a legal consulting firm, more than 60% of Spanish companies have not yet incorporated these solutions. However, those pioneering companies that have already started to use legaltech, specifically 36% according to the report, claim that the department’s performance has improved, costs have decreased and time has been reduced.

Tools with a high level of adoption

Legaltech solutions represent a major transformation in the way companies, law firms and individuals interact with the legal system. Although some of the tools offered by legaltech already have a high level of adoption, such as electronic signatures (89%) or electronic invoicing systems (49%), there are other possibilities that have barely been explored, such as process automation (18%).

However, more and more firms want or have among their objectives to implement technology to become more efficient in their processes, as well as to have specialized legaltech advice and personnel. “Law firms and law firms are aware that innovation, technology and disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence will have a major impact on their sector,” says Lucia Carrau, promoter of the Valencia Legal Hackathon, which this year celebrated its third edition.

Focus on other aspects of the legal service

The incorporation of AI could speed up, above all, the processes of analysis or review of documentation, for example. In this way, the human part will be able to focus on other aspects of the legal service. For this reason, universities are already incorporating training in this sense, as they will play a key role in training tomorrow’s jurists who will have to live with these new tools. This is the case of the University of Valencia, which has created the LegalTech laboratory dedicated to promoting legal professionals with a dual legal-technological profile.

Hackathons

In this sense, also noteworthy are the hackathons, an event format that brings together in one or two days young talent of different profiles (in this case, legal, business, developers, programmers and marketing) and presents them with challenges to respond through innovation as, for example, the Valencia Legal Hackathon which is now in its 3rd edition and which arose when a law firm contacted Innova.legal to initiate an internal innovation process to develop solutions that could be used in their day to day.

In this latest edition, this uninterrupted competition of more than 12 hours of work has reached 225 ideas and eight filtered and prototyped solutions to improve the processes of contact, load distribution, case management and delivery of results of law firms, as well as the final client experience.

For example, awards were given to projects proposing: the creation of software that reports in real time to the client the progress and total hours spent on their case using AI models or the development of an AI-based system that automates the initial stage of the case management process. This system will assign lawyers considering criteria such as experience, workload and specialization, in addition to providing for billing and facilitating the opening of files, among other issues.

In the coming years, this type of initiative will continue to grow, as integrating innovation and technology requires professionals with the necessary skills and multidisciplinary teams.