Legal Tech and Lawtech: Towards a Framework for Technological Trends in the Legal Services Industry

The use of legal technology (legal tech) and the lawtech ecosystem of legal start-ups has experienced tremendous growth in recent years. To provide a structured approach of analysing IT innovations in the legal sector, we propose a framework for lawtech applications, classifying them into three groups: internal, B2C and B2B applications. In the context of this framework, we examine technological trends in lawtech and their potential to support and transform processes in specific areas of business or personal law. We acknowledge that within lawtech there is a gap between the areas of interest of legal practitioners, IT professionals and academic researchers, and that some areas have received considerable attention by these groups, while other areas have been left relatively unexplored by one or more of these groups. However, the growing interest by legal practitioners in advanced technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) is further closing the gap between academic research, IT professionals and legal practice.