The COVID-19 pandemic happened more than five years ago but it just seems like yesterday!
This unprecedented global crisis disrupted human society, financial markets, and industries all over the world. And the legal industry was no exception. The pandemic reshaped the way law firms and corporate legal departments worked. It shifted the types of legal issues their clients faced and also brought about a slew of new regulations.
In this new and confusing scenario, legal professionals had to quickly update their knowledge and skills to be able to continue to provide timely advice and value to clients. They were also forced to adapt quickly to remote work while firms were forced to make adjustments to their business and operational models.
So, what allowed them to make these adjustments with minimal disruptions?
Legal technology!
Legal technology or legaltech refers to technologies and software that empower legal professionals to do more, do it better, and do it with less.
In many ways, legaltech was a saviour for the legal industry during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But its transformation potential didn’t disappear with the crisis.
If anything, legaltech continues to transform the legal industry many years after the crisis is already past – particularly with the addition of powerful AI capabilities to legaltech applications and tools.
What is legaltech?
How is it revolutionising the legal industry in India and elsewhere?
What is driving the adoption of legaltech among law firms and corporate legal departments all over the world?
And what does the future hold for legaltech and AI in legal?
Let’s explore!
What is Legaltech?
In recent years, technology has made huge forays into multiple industries, giving rise to an amalgamation of sectors, such as fintech (financial services + technology), insurtech (insurance + technology), edtech (education + technology), and agritech (agriculture + technology). All these sectors have one thing in common: they’re increasingly adopting technology to optimise their business models, create more revenue streams, and deliver greater value-add to clients and customers.
As one of the oldest industries of the modern world, the legal industry has traditionally relied more on face-to-face interactions and human inputs. Technology and automation have always played less of a role in influencing the way the industry works. But this old way of thinking and operating is rapidly becoming obsolete.
Now, even old-school law firms are enthusiastically adopting technology in order to:
- Streamline processes
- Simplify legal workflows
- Save time with automation
- Make their services more easily accessible
- Improve work accuracy and ensure its timely delivery
- Enhance client relationships
The technologies that are built for the legal industry so they can achieve all of the above objectives are collectively known as legaltech.
Legaltech refers to technologies and solutions that support the legal industry. These may include solutions for document management, digital signatures, case management, dispute resolution, legal research, e-discovery, compliance, analytics, and much more.
Different legaltech offerings simplify various areas of legal practice. They enable legal professionals to practice law more efficiently and deliver better legal services to their clients. Legaltech and AI in legal bring many more benefits to legal professionals, law firms, and corporate legal departments. These benefits are explored in detail in this section.
Key Drivers of Legaltech Growth and Adoption
In 2024, the size of the global legal services market was about USD 1,053 billion. By 2030, it’s expected to be around USD 1,375 billion. This represents a healthy CAGR of 4.5% during this 5-year period.
The growth for this market will be even more pronounced in India over the coming years. In 2023, Indian legal services providers earned revenues of USD 19.1 billion. By 2030, they are forecast to almost 2X this figure to USD 37.4 billion – a very vigorous CAGR of more than 10%.
Clearly, the future is bright for the legal industry, especially in India.
However, many disruptive forces have emerged in recent years that are pushing legal service providers to rethink their business models, reorganise their work practices, and adapt to change. These include:
- Evolving client expectations: Clients now demand greater accessibility to services, faster response times, more personalised communications
- Shift in demand: There is an increasing demand for client-centric, personalised offerings.
- Changing service delivery models and billing practices: The old ways of delivering services and billing clients are fast becoming obsolete.
- Different ways of working: The emergence of remote and hybrid work models require new work practices and tools.
- Changing regulatory landscape: New laws are emerging at a fast pace and many law firms are struggling to keep up.
- Cyberthreats: The expanding cyber-threat landscape has created a need for robust cybersecurity tools and practices.
So how can law firms rethink, reorganise, and adapt to these disruptive forces?
The answer: technology.
Legaltech advancements geared towards the legal industry, particularly around AI and automations, empower law firms and practitioners to effectively deal with disruptions, while also strengthening their financial, regulatory, competitive, and security posture.
How Legaltech is Changing the Legal Industry
Legaltech has made huge strides in the past couple of decades and completely overhauled many aspects of the legal industry and profession.
For example, until a few years ago, virtual meetings were few and far between, with both customers and lawyers preferring to meet face to face. Today, many firms have adapted their client communication strategies and more lawyers interact with clients via video conferencing tools like Zoom and Teams. Even courts now allow video conferencing to keep legal gears moving.
Technologies related to document digitisation are also popular in the legal sector. Many legal firms are now going paperless, storing vast quantities of their information in electronic form, rather than on paper. Many others are adopting digital signatures and digital case management solutions to reduce the burden of paper-based processes and workflows. Similarly, online dispute resolution systems are revolutionising the legal industry, as are electronic legal marketplaces and multisided platforms connecting legal professionals with customers.
In recent years, several legal firms and corporate legal departments have adopted legaltech solutions like document drafting platforms to make contracts, wills, and other kinds of legal documents, to analyse cases, and even for litigation support. An increasing number are also embracing blockchain technology to execute “smart contracts” that ensure hassle-free enforcement and reduce counterparty risk.
Legaltech tools are also available to simplify specific legal activities, including :
- Case analysis and management
- Document management
- Scheduling and time-tracking
- Anti-money laundering (AML)
- Document review and e-discovery
- Automated document assembly
- Legal practice management
- Legal research, and
- IP and asset management
Cloud-based solutions, electronic payment platforms, and legal chatbots are also making their presence felt in the legal industry.
And then there are AI-powered legaltech tools and platforms that according to one report are “transforming the legal profession” (more on this in this section).
But why are so many law firms and legal professionals enthusiastically embracing legaltech and legal AI solutions?
What benefits can they garner from these tools?
Let’s explore this aspect next.
Benefits of Legaltech
The right legaltech solutions benefit all parties participating in the legal system, including lawyers, judges, and clients. Modern software products enable lawyers to practice law more efficiently. Some can store and access documents on the go, thus ensuring that they never miss important case files or pertinent information.
Similarly, virtual proceedings conducted online without the need for the physical presence of parties removes availability barriers for witnesses and experts to appear in court. It also makes it easier for disadvantaged litigants to appear, decreasing failure-to-appear rates and increasing case closure rates. Whether used for pre-trial hearings, arraignments, or even trials, legal communications technology is increasingly used in court proceedings to improve efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and accessibility of the legal apparatus.
Legaltech enables the public to easily find and hire legal services. Through dedicated lawyer directories, they can narrow down their search and find the expert they need for a particular practice area. At the same time, lawyers can collaborate better with their colleagues and serve more clients, irrespective of any party’s geographical location.
Legaltech is also revolutionising the legal sector because it:
- Automates processes to speed up operations, streamline legal workflows, and enable legal professionals to do their work better and faster
- Simplifies research so lawyers get the information they need quickly and can stay updated on important facts that may affect their cases
- Enables better resource and time management so legal professionals can perform high-value tasks and effectively use junior colleagues to complete lower-value tasks
- Reduces errors with automation and analytics
- Increases transparency in cases, legal relationships, and information ecosystems
- Brings convenience into legal transactions for both lawyers and their clients
- Enhances client experiences by allowing law firms to know their clients better and offer personalised service to keep them engaged and satisfied
While the term “legaltech” encompasses a wide range of products and solutions (some of which we have explored in this section), there’s one sub-section of legaltech that’s truly reshaping and revolutionising the legal industry.
We are of course referring to AI in legal.
AI in Legal: Current and Potential Impact
One 2025 Thomson Reuters survey of legal professionals uncovered some interesting facts about AI in legal:
- 77% of respondents believe that AI will have a high or transformational positive impact on their work by 2030.
- 72% believe that AI will be a force for good in their profession.
- Exploring and implementing AI is the highest business priority for almost 50% of firms.
These stats clearly show that legal AI is already making waves in the legal industry.
And it’s here to stay.
So, what can AI do for law firms and legal professionals?
AI-powered tools could automate numerous tasks related to:
- Legal research: Conduct research on cases, precedents, case laws, statutes, and other legal topics
- Document reviews: Sift through vast amounts of data to identify relevant information for cases and other purposes.
- Text summaries: Summarise information across different sources and platforms to simplify and accelerate research.
- Contract analysis: Analyse contracts and for potential risks, issues, and missing/problematic identifying clauses, ensuring consistent, accurate final output.
- Translations: Provide real-time language translations to enhance client communications.
- Data insights and reports: Analyse large volumes of data to provide actionable and predictive insights and reports to inform decision-making.
All in all, AI-enabled tools could automate and simplify many tedious, time-consuming activities that take up a great deal of legal professionals’ workflows.
With these automations, legal teams could potentially free up at least 4 hours of time per week, according to the Thomson Reuters report. These time savings could significantly boost individuals’ productivity. For law firms, the time savings could translate into 266 million hours of increased productivity or about $100,000 in new billable time per lawyer per year.
In addition to time savings, AI could help lawyers and law firms to work more efficiently, so they can process and turn around work faster. AI tools also product consistent output. By reducing errors in work, lawyers and firms get more accurate and reliable outcomes. Another advantage of AI-enabled tools that is that empower legal professionals to focus on important priorities like providing better services and increasing client satisfaction.
Some of the other potential benefits of AI in legal include:
- More streamlined and efficient legal workflows
- Enhanced due diligence
- Quicker responses to client inquiries
- Improved client communication
- Lower labour costs
- More optimal use of legal professionals’ time and skills
- Advanced analytics for better decision-making
The Future of Legaltech and Legal AI
In recent years, more and more legal firms and professionals have embraced legaltech and legal AI solutions as a transformative force for positive change. And this shouldn’t surprise anyone because as we have seen, the benefits are both significant and clear.
In the near future, this traditional paper-based legal industry will adopt even more legaltech and AI solutions, whether it’s for document drafting or contract management, legal discovery or practice management, client collaboration or legal workflow management. Many firms will be particularly keen on adopting cutting-edge legal AI solutions to add exponential value to their own bottomline as well as to their clients’.
Conclusion
Law firms and legal departments that adopt legaltech solutions – particularly AI-enabled legaltech solutions – can streamline workflows, save time, and increase billable hours. They can also attract more clients and serve them better with more personalised service and enhanced experiences. With the right legaltech and legal AI tools in place, legal businesses and professionals can see huge improvements in their operational efficiency, productivity, competitiveness, and most importantly, their profitability.
