As global player in the field of tech-enabled legal services, in particular eDiscovery, Legal Operations, Information Governance & Compliance, we see, from an international perspective, several trends with growing relevance for the legal space in Germany:
Trend 1: Legal Operations as a function is maturing
Far more legal departments now have dedicated Legal Operations staff who are working at optimizing how people, processes and tech are deployed to improve cost-effectiveness and the efficiency of legal services. To this end, many more are now automating processes to get the right work into the right hands, integrating applications, and leveraging data to continually improve performance.
Trend 2: Growing demand for tools to support data driven decision making in the legal profession
Across corporations and law firms, we see a growing need for and adoption of tools to support data-driven decision-making processes, business intelligence tools and analytics to report on and improve their efficiency, costs and talent acquisition/retention, often driving in organizations in Germany the adoption of tools largely in use in the US.
Trend 3: Continued trend of migration to the cloud and increase in relevant data volumes
The trend of moving data to the cloud has reached companies in German-speaking countries, as has the growing corporate use of social media platforms and the introduction of tools such as Teams, which often poses a major challenge for the GDPR-compliant data management, processing and findability of data when needed, for example in internal and regulatory investigations.
Trend 4: Increased interest in and adoption of easy-to-use software applications supporting the legal function
The rise of web-based and easy-to-use software solutions for inhouse usage to support digitization continues, now opening up to a broader scope of processes in the legal departments, including low/no-code automation tools for intake and triage, bots for FAQs, and robotic process automation (RPA) for repetitive tasks.
Trend 5: The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics in the legal profession
Accelerated by large litigation matters & investigation projects, in particular in antitrust-related cases, the need for advanced solutions such as AI and advanced analytics to reduce the amount of data and improve the findability of relevant information continues to grow. Also in Contract Management – both pre- and post-signature – the solutions strive to make sense of unstructured data and support informed decisions on matters such as feasible termination, notice requirements, implications of a new regulation, or the applicability of force majeure. Contract analytics can also help with standardizing contracts and pinpointing outlier clauses that could affect negotiations or increase the risk of non-compliance.
nicolas.pezzarossa@epiqglobal.com
