What do you think will be the impact on law firms of the continuing advances in technology over the next few years? (200 words)
There are two central impacts to law firms from technology:
1. Improved efficiency of law firms.
Law firms are already seizing the opportunity that new technologies bring, allowing AI and computerisation of tasks to heighten efficiency and free up lawyers to undertake more complex and nuanced tasks.
Examples of this include Slaughter & May’s ‘Luminance’, Allen & Overy’s ‘Fuse’ hub which developed the now multimillion-pound firm ‘Kira’ (now used by A&O), Simmons & Simmons’ ‘Wavelength’ (the first ever ‘legal engineering’ technology), and Clifford Chance’s ‘Create+65’.
This collection of examples serves to illustrate how technology is becoming a necessity if law firms desire competitiveness. The technology reduces the workload on lawyers, reduces monotony of tasks, and increases the accuracy of analysis. This is needed to attract clients, and to keep the best lawyers working at the firm.
[Feedback: It’s incredible how much difference an effective structure lends to your answer, particularly where you are constrained by word count. It’s up to you whether you use headings but they work well here. The key is to clearly split out your answer with distinct sections for every new point.
In this section, the candidate talks about how technology will affect the delivery of legal services. The candidate thoughtfully provides some mainstream examples of legal tech, namely tech incubators hosted by some of the largest law firms. If you want to dive deeper, see this map of legal tech startups and scaleups provided by Legal Geek. We suggest that the scaleup examples further down the page are the best ones to briefly research and include in your application because they have the best brand recognition among law firms, but there is some exciting stuff happening at the early-stage startups too.]
2. Increasing opportunities as technology outstrips legislation.
Technology breeds technology: advances are exponentially increasing resulting in more unique goods, services, and opportunities in the markets. Legislation can rarely keep up, and there are more opportunities for technology to ‘go rogue’ or for issues to occur. For law firms, this presents further opportunities and challenges to help their clients: a lucrative but intense future.
[Feedback: Think about money laundering. Separate this into improved delivery and new opportunities to provide advice that we have not even considered need for
[Feedback: In this section, the candidate makes the valid point that technology is likely to create the need for legal advice for new sectors and use cases that we have not even considered yet. For example, someone will need to advise on the legal implications of space law given the advances by SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, but there will be many other use cases for technology (and hence demand for legal services) which we cannot even envisage yet.
The candidate could develop the second part of his answer further. It’s not so much that legislation can’t keep up: clients would still need advice about their powers and obligations in respect of emerging areas of commerce even if all necessary legislation was somehow in place. Nevertheless, this is a strong answer given the limited word count.]
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