The US is the spiritual home of legal technology. The world’s one remaining superpower supports such a vast domestic legal industry – and such a fiercely competitive market for legal services – that it is bound to foster more innovation than the smaller global markets. The oft-quoted axiom that “whenever America sneezes, the rest of the world catches ‘flu” holds as true for legal technology as it does for popular culture and international relations.
The document and practice management systems that underpin nearly every large European legal practice are all-American inventions. They may have been adapted, developed and sometimes even improved elsewhere, but most of the original concepts arose in the US out of sheer economic necessity. Most recently, a meteoric growth in the use of ‘electronic discovery’ or e-discovery and the resulting range of litigation support technologies, has caused the powers that be in jurisdictions around the world to re-examine and adapt their justice systems. In the UK, for example, the adoption of e-disclosure looks set to fundamentally change the processes that turn the wheels of justice.
