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required for simple property transactions. Some practitioners will charge more as a result of time; some firms will simply bear the cost internally. Digital intrusion is a real issue. Intrusions can be slow and insidious. There could be a keylogger taking note of every word you type or a virus forwarding every email sent from or received by your account to another, controlled email account, all without your knowledge. Practices must be vigilant and proactive, and stay up-to-date with the creative ways hackers and thieves are using digital technologies to intrude into systems. Updating systems immediately, training your staff to spot issues and report them early, and adopting other proactive digital safety measures, could be the key to avoiding business interruption, comprised devices, breach of privacy, confidence, and privilege, and incorrect disbursements of client funds.
What developments do you see in how legal services are delivered? There appears to be a trend towards using bots to interact with clients. This is an interesting technological development that may be beneficial for people who do not like communicating with people. However, in my experience, clients still want to speak with a real person, especially if they consider their issue to be stressful or significant. For example, in dispute resolution many clients simply want to know that we have got their back or that someone is in their corner. They are looking for empathy, assurance, confidence, and other things best provided by human beings. Culturally, there are many who prefer to do business ‘kanohi ki te kanohi’ or face-to-face. So, while bots may have their place, such as dealing with routine communications and non-contentious work, I question whether clients feel special when their first interaction is with a bot. While lawyers should use every tool at their disposal to provide 38
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better client service, including automated technologies in many cases, the service provider should be a person whenever possible, in my view at least.
What opportunities has legal innovation brought you? Evolution Lawyers has adopted or developed whatever technologies or innovations we believe we need to provide the type of legal service modern clients would expect. Our aim is to practise as leanly and agile as possible. By simplifying practice, our lawyers have more bandwidth to work on legal problems and complete tasks accurately. Administration and paperwork can burden a legal mind significantly, and the cost of a person to attend to that administration is significant for small businesses. We are fortunate that many of our clients have similar philosophies to us. For example, Evolution Lawyers works closely with Arizto Real Estate, a company that documents and processes its residential property contracts digitally. Like us, they have an in-house software development team. By working and keeping pace with innovative clients, we create opportunities for our young firm.
What are some of your tips to start innovating or developing an innovative mindset? Keep it simple – identify a problem and find a solution. We do not need to be tech-experts to do this in practice. Indeed, this is what lawyers do on a daily basis. Many of Evolution Lawyers’ innovations have come from having to deal with something unsatisfactory in existing, normal practice. Rather than tolerating the issue, we find a way to fix it – immediately, if possible. There are many excellent, cost-effective steps that firms could take right now. For example, two-step
authentication, digital signing, legal working day calculators, and more. Some of those benefits are free. One just has to investigate and try them. Work with professional developers. As lawyers, we see the consequences of the bush lawyer or the legal dabbler trying to do their own legal work. We engage a competent professional to build our software, so that it can be maintained by any professional in the future. For us, we see it as a risk to build sustainable software ourselves, and a heavy time commitment to learn to code. So, we leave that job to the experts.
Why is it important for legal professionals to continue to learn about legal innovation and leveraging technology? Lawyers should be continually learning. That is part of being a professional. Legal innovation is part of that continual learning practice. Like anything, the more you know, the more you can leverage that knowledge to create opportunity and benefit for yourself and others. ▪
Andrew King andrew@lawfest. nz is organiser of LawFest 2019, which will be held in Auckland on 21 March. Tamina CunninghamAdams will be one of the speakers at the event.