If you thought we wouldn’t take an interview with ChatGPT and ask for an opinion on its role in legal innovation, you are wrong. Because we absolutely did.
And it was “kind” enough to deliver some useful insights.
Read on.
Legal professionals are usually more conservative and don’t like changes. There is a reasonable explanation for this – they need something that works 100% of the time and don’t want to take any chances. Legal consulting is highly responsible, and even the smallest mistakes can cause significant damages.
But things have changed. New technologies are more reliable than ever, and not using them practically makes lawyers and other legal professionals lose a lot of money.
Can you do the work without legal technologies? Of course. Should you? Definitely not. This article analyses the reasons why you should use legal technologies.
Avvoka is a document automation, negotiation, and analytics tool designed to help law firms, in-house legal teams, and businesses (of all sizes) draft documents, negotiate them, and leverage data insights from that process to draft better documents, and eventually get to “yes” faster. Unlike legacy tools, with Avvoka, you can rapidly build automated versions of your most complex documents using our intuitive automation builder. This means no more tricky coding within Word documents.
Today we are discussing legal innovation with Giles Thompson, Head of Growth at Avvoka. Giles spearheads its revenue growth strategy, works with leading law firms, in-house legal teams, and businesses. Aside from this, he spends lots of his time designing and creating bespoke document automation solutions for clients.
Media literacy represents the competency allowing the bearer to identify various categories of media content and understand the message thus conveyed. Although distinctive and somehow contrasting, all media has one thing in common: someone created it for a specific reason. Understanding that reason is the very core of media literacy.
Media literacy has become a critical skill for judges and lawyers alike, as the legal profession uses media sources to a greater extent than others. A correct interpretation of facts, unclouded by media manipulation, is the bedrock of a healthy justice system.
Every media content consumer and, especially, legal practitioners must undergo proper education on how to recognize and evaluate facts, opinions, media messages, and the media creator’s innate bias if they want to become the arbiters of truth in the information age. As such, legal education should take this problem in all its seriousness and ensure that the graduates they provide to be guardians of justice are media literate enough to practice law with a trained eye towards the content they consume, use, and create. In the words of Phillip Meyer, “[i]f we exist exclusively in a hall of mirrors where there are no actual facts but only alternative facts, then there may be judgment but not justice.”
In an era where uncertainty is the only certainty, roles such as Legal Technology Solution Manager play a vital part in maintaining legal businesses’ viability. With a sustained focus on legal output standardisation, risk mitigation, data protection, legal services scalability, process advancement, and optimisation to sustain an integrated growth strategy, an LTSM will have to manage mixed, intercultural teams.
This type of work involves sharp interpersonal skills, such as networking skills and communication prowess. LTSMs will have to supervise legal tech operations and procedures in order to obtain cost efficiencies, risk containment, off the chart ROI, and client satisfaction. The proliferation of legal tech solutions grants LTSMs a greater negotiation power while, at the same time, puts them under pressure to legitimise their choice.
That is why LTSMs must demonstrate a selected set of skills that recommend them for such an influential role. Above all, the LTSMs must always stay connected to the industry’s grapevine, be ahead of the game, and virtually manage the future.
Here are some takeaways when it comes to networking and relationship building:
1. Base your networks on trust, diversity, and brokerage. This way, you will upgrade your level of information from what you know to whom you know.
2. Use your know-how to benefit your connections and use your connections to help your clients and peers. This way, networking will be more than a self-benefiting tool but rather a method to build long-lasting mutually beneficial relationships. In time, this network will expand to include connections of your connections, in an overall movement towards diversity and comprehensiveness.
3. Put your relationships to work: connect with as many people within the field as possible. This way, an ever-expanding niche network will emerge. But limiting to your professional network would be a mistake. Instead, try networking laterally, vertically, and horizontally and take advantage of the grapevine effect: valuable information can sometimes come from places you least expect.
4. Remember: you needn’t be an excessively outgoing person to frame your network. Making a bare effort to ask a question, connect (with) people, share relevant information are well-suited actions to engage, preserve, and nourish your network. Always remember the four “ups” when networking: read up, show up, listen up, and follow up!