I'd love to hear more about perceived opportunities in legal tech. For some reason, the legal industry seems very averse to change, but I'm sure that's not always going to be the case. (Lawyer here).
The sector is bonkers and the incentives are terrible. Most tech adoption is in the low-margin high-volume sectors, where 'good enough' products are dominant. Superior execution in this segment could lead to big wins. In the low-volume high-margin sector, many firms have proprietary workflows/inhouse staff dealing with their KM needs.
That said, there's a few cute 'novel' approaches in new generation TAR and AI assisted [Insert mass document type sorting/classifying/digesting]. Beyond that I think the big developments aren't going to be in the area of 'can technology do something fundamentally new'. They'll be enabling tools to allow new business models. Think 'data-science consulting, reporting and expert witness testimony for legal discovery databases'.
I also think that overall, professional development tools are underdeveloped, but young lawyers are undercapitalized and the core value bottleneck in low-volume work is the client intake pipeline, not getting good people to do the work.
Edit: Added a missing word.
H.R.6714 - Electronic Court Records Reform Act of 2018
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6714
1. Law is highly interpretable, it can't be just 1/0. Facts are 1/0, but not the law 2. Law firms tend to be small in size, generally <200, Lawyers are inclined to start their own practice ASAP. That limits the software provider's capability to charge more or upsell. Also, the law firms can't afford to buy a lot of software. 3. The distrust among people in the legal industry is just baffling
There are a few more challenges, but am able to recollect only a few.
(am a software engineer and my brother is a lawyer. we keep trying to build solutions for law firms)
For me: I don't know the first thing about law and the perceived value of building something in that space is low compared with, for example, healthcare, where I feel like a lot of people can more easily see the benefits on real people.
I think if you can clearly define the areas where either the perceived value (for the developer) is really high or the perceived complexity is relatively low, that's where you'll see the next developments in this space.
I'd be curious to know where you think these areas are.
You can imagine NLP being quite useful in sifting through piles of old cases, a step beyond simple text search.