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Experts have emphasised the importance of legal technology being designed by practitioners themselves to ensure digital tools align with the real-world needs of modern lawyering.
According to Atto Legal founder Roy Kim, lawyers need to play an active role in creating the tools and workflows that will reshape their profession, ensuring that the future of legal technology is directly guided by those who rely on it daily.
Speaking with Jerome Doraisamy at the recent AI Innovate session, Kim recognised that legal technology should be built around the needs of lawyers, rather than expecting lawyers, specifically legal practitioners, to adapt to technology that does not necessarily suit their work.
“The future of law and legal tech should be designed by lawyers,” Kim said.
“Because lawyers are your ultimate end users of legal tech.
“And if these tools exist to help lawyers to do better lawyering, the brief needs to come from lawyers.”
Drawing on his experience as a property and commercial lawyer, Kim recommended that the relationship between lawyers and technology providers needs to be an ongoing collaboration, with practitioners continually providing feedback to improve the products they use.
“The tech is moulding to how lawyers operate, as opposed to lawyers moulding to the tech that’s been provided to them,” he said.
However, Kim acknowledged that being an experienced lawyer does not automatically make someone an effective technology designer, but rather practitioners should comprehend which aspects of their work do in fact require professional judgement and identify what can be improved through automation.
“A prequalification for a lawyer to be a great designer is for the feedback loop to be accommodated and handled on a continuous basis,” he said.
“It’s creating an environment where lawyers are able to freely express their frustrations in their daily practices.”
Ultimately, Kim argued that lawyers need to recognise where their expertise is most valuable, especially as AI becomes increasingly capable of handling repetitive, mundane tasks.
“You need to understand where judgement comes in, where judgement cannot be automated, where judgement cannot be AI’d,” Kim said.
“It’s also understanding the distinction between what can be automated and how we can use AI.
“I think it’s the experienced lawyers that are able to apply that discretion because they know what the risks are and how to deal with those risks.”
In addition to empowering practitioners to shape tech development, Kim stressed that legal professionals must clearly differentiate rule-based automation from artificial intelligence as they modernise their operational practices.
He noted that firms should first identify tasks that follow clear rules and provide outcomes that are predictable, as these are better suited to automation than generative AI.
“An output that follows a rule needs to be automated because when it comes to verifying the output, the more deterministic it is easier to verify,” Kim said.
“If you are, for example, using a fixed formula for calculating stamp duty, you know it’s always going to be 100 per cent correct.”
Conversely, Kim highlighted that AI offers significant advantages for complex or nuanced work, such as generating preliminary drafts, ideating strategies, and uncovering hidden vulnerabilities within client instructions.
“Where the output of a type of work doesn’t necessarily involve a deterministic output, that’s where AI could come in,” Kim said.
“Also problem avoidance as well, because a lot of the time lawyers are thinking about just using AI to help with the initial set of documents or initial set of questionnaires and intake for a client.
“But I think where AI comes in very useful is you’ve got to finalise documents.”
For practitioners feeling intimidated by rapid digital advancement, Kim suggested viewing modern technology as a chance to focus on the deeply satisfying elements of practising law.
“Think about the parts of work that you don’t enjoy working at the law firm and then think about how much technology can remove that so that you can focus on the type of work that you enjoy,” Kim said.
