The US is the spiritual home of legal technology. 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. 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.
Within the US, trendsetters are for the most part large national or global law firms that use their size and geographical spread to foster innovation – or at least finance it. Many, if not most, of the IT companies that dream up new concepts for specialist legal software need a cash injection from a single large client before their products get beyond the beta-testing phase. During the last economic downturn, the development of new legal application concepts may have tailed off but this was more down to a change of emphasis in US firms’ IT strategies than to a slowdown of innovation per se. The US was still exporting legal technology trends – such as making systems work harder.
