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There is no official system for categorizing technological solutions applied to the legal field (Legal Tech). A rigid classification may struggle to keep pace with the dynamic nature of the legal industry and its diverse applications. For researching the Legal Tech ecosystem in Germany, it was adopted the terminology used by Stanford Law School's CODEX (Stanford Center for Legal Informatics). This includes categories such as: Marketplace, Legal Education, Document Automation, Legal Research, Practice Management, eDiscovery, Compliance, Analytics, and Online Dispute Resolution (ODR).During the research there were two additional categories: Digital Consulting and General Tools. While many other categories and subcategories could be relevant, these choices were made to streamline the classification and facilitate a broader analysis of the Legal Tech markets. This approach allows for a more comprehensive overview, rather than delving into the specific details of each company.
It is no easy task to precisely determine the Legaltech category for companies and institutions. There are segments that offer more than one type of artifact to solve different pain points of the legal persona. Therefore, it is possible for a company to use more than one category, conditioned to the dynamism and the changes in the legal market, corporate mergers and strategic movements in the offer of digital products.
For the purpose of this study, only one category was assigned to each business, ensuring that none of them would be repeated in the list. For this categorization, the primary product or legal solution offered by each business was analyzed and a category was chosen.
Here follows a description of each category and the criteria used for this study: Marketplace
Description: Platforms where legal professionals, clients and service providers can connect and transact various legal services. These platforms facilitate the lawyer-client matchmaking or hiring legal professionals from specialized areas of Law. They often offer features such as profiles for lawyers and legal professionals, client reviews and ratings, payment processing, and communication tools. This category also considers Legal Process Outsourcing, which involves the delegation of legal tasks and processes to external service providers and platforms which helps the recruitment of bachelors, job markets and HR for Law.
Summary: Expert portals, lawyer directories, Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO), Recruitment/HR and Legal Job market.
Legal Education
Description: Focus on providing tools and resources to enhance legal learning and professional development. They may offer online courses, training modules, digital literature or virtual classrooms tailored for law students and legal professionals. This category also includes topics for individuals interested in the intersection of Law and Technology such as digitization, legal design, cybercrimes and data protection, to give some examples. Non-profit student initiatives and research laboratories at Universities could be also considered in this category, promoting debate on Legal tech and encouraging internal or external projects related to Law and technology, but they do not offer a legal tech solution in the market. This category could also include the sources of legal news, portals for legal content and podcasts, as they contribute to the updating of legal content.
Summary: eLearning platforms, legal content for exam studies, legal tech student initiative, Think Tanks, portals for legal news, podcasts and digital platforms of legal content.
Document Automation
Description: Software solutions to streamline the process of creating and managing legal documents. These platforms often utilize templates and workflows to generate customized legal documents quickly, such as contracts, indentures, business proposals, petitions and court decisions. Users can input relevant information, and the software automatically populates the appropriate fields, generates the document, and may also assist with formatting, compliance or the procedure of automating signatures. There are also products or systems to manage the lifecycle of contracts (Contract Lifecycle Management — CLM), helping to close deals more efficiently, reducing bureaucracy.
Summary: Document analysis, document creation, contract automation, contract lifecycle management (CLM), automated signature.
Legal Research
Description: Legal research companies provide online platforms and databases that enable legal professionals to conduct comprehensive research on case law, court decisions, precedents, legislation, legal doctrine and other legal documents, as commentaries to statutes and regulations. It is common to identify advanced search capabilities, citation analysis and tools for organizing research findings. The digital products give legal professionals the comprehensive and specialized content they need.
Summary: Legal databases: precedents, court decisions, legislation, commentaries, doctrine and specialized literature.
Practice Management
Description: Software or tool solutions to help law firms, legal departments and legal professionals manage their practices more efficiently. Some solutions may also be applied to Notary’s offices, as well. These platforms typically cover several functions such as client intake, case management, billing and scheduling. Features may include time tracking, client communication portals, task assignment, and integration with accounting software. The products use data and technology to combat problems in organizing legal information. There are also strategies to improve the communication with the clients, such as Chatbots, for example. This category also includes Legal Operations (Legal Ops), the business processes which supports in-house legal teams to deliver more efficient services to their clients.
Summary: Management software & tools for legal departments, law offices and notaries, client communication, Legal Operations (Legal Ops).
eDiscovery
Description: eDiscovery (electronic discovery) is the process of Identifying, collecting and producing electronically stored information (ESI) in response to a request for a lawsuit or an investigation. These platforms facilitate the identification, collection, review, and production of relevant ESI for regulatory investigations.
Summary: eDiscovery platforms, Electronically stored information (ESI).
Compliance
Description: Digitization poses new challenges to existing requirements, especially in areas such as rights and obligations in handling data. The software solutions help organizations ensure adherence to legal and regulatory requirements relevant to their industries, such as data protection, data privacy, IT security and IT compliance. Features may include compliance tracking, risk assessment tools and training modules on this topic. This category includes companies which offer solutions for Regulatory technology, popularly known as RegTech, improving the way businesses manage regulatory compliance.
Summary: Regtech (Regulatory technology), data privacy, data protection, IT security, compliance.
Analytics
Description: Legal tech companies use data analysis techniques and tools to have insights, patterns, and predictions from vast amounts of legal data. These insights can inform legal strategies, risk assessment, and decision-making. Predictive analytics, data visualization, and trend analysis tools are common features. In Brazil the extraction and monitoring of public data which give content and insights for the legal users could be included in this category, since there is no other specific for this purpose.
Summary: Data reports, Jurimetrics, Legal Business Intelligence, monitoring and extraction of public data, lawsuit and legal publications monitoring.
Online Dispute Resolution (ODR)
Description: Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) solutions offer digital platforms and tools to facilitate the resolution of disputes outside of traditional courtrooms. These platforms enable parties to negotiate, mediate, or arbitrate disputes online, often through video conferencing and secure messaging systems. In Germany, a number of standardized solutions have been found for conflicts involving flight delays, baggage hijacking and air law. These applications aim to determine and enforce users’ rights in a partially or fully automated manner. They could not be fully considered as Online Dispute Resolution solutions, since in Europe this definition is restricted to alternative dispute resolution methods.
Summary: Alternative conflict resolution methods (mediation, conciliation, arbitration), digital legal agreements between the parties, automated legal advice and claim enforcement.