The year 2018 was filled with emerging new technologies worldwide and across all industries, including the Legal sectors. Law firms in Africa are following the suite of their European counterparts, and they are open to the idea of cloud-based solutions that enables practical work leading to a more substantial output.
In 2019, here are some of the trends to look out for within the Legal Tech Scene.
1. The Era of Client-Focused Law Firms: Clients are day to day individuals who do not have the luxury to understand your work processes or know the law. Clients expect the same level of competency and excellent service from other service providers they are subscribed to or any business they interact with. So law firms that can provide instant communication, thoughtful service, and all-around client-centred experiences will stand out from the rest.
2. Security and Privacy: The Conversations about cybersecurity and privacy has already begun since the emergence of cloud-based storage. Information’s are now vulnerable to hackers; hence, I believe the conversation would intensify in 2019. We must start by identifying the requirements to prevent hacking both remotely and otherwise. In Europe, they took the initiative to implement the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, and new privacy rules were coming into effect in California in 2020. This proves that strict privacy/security rules will likely be a growing trend in 2019 and beyond. We believe Africa will begin conversations as regards privacy and security like their European counterparts in 2019.
3. Consolidating /Digitization of Internal Processes: The demands for efficiency in law firms will push more firms to seek out a technology to improve their internal processes. In 2019, firms will also be turning to automation to help streamline business processes across the firm. There are software solutions that already provide collaboration and complete automation of a firm’s strategies. Documents would be centralized, software solutions that scale up processes whilst improving compliance and gaining efficiencies.
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