Naseeha Machingal, Director – Client Success, LegalEase Solutions: “ALSPs will thrive during an economic downturn as the DNA of an ALSP requires it to constantly innovate. As legal departments’ budgets shrink, we will see more general counsels leaning towards a trusted ALSP partner to help with busy voluminous work and lean on them for providing legal staffing for short term durations.”
Jim O’Hare, Vice President for CLM Services, LegalEase Solutions: “2023 will bring more NLP models to vendor CLM systems supporting more contract types and more complex formats. Further to basic metadata extraction and clause decomposition, concepts specific to context and clause change materiality will get stronger. Growth in the understanding of contract obligations and outcomes and SLAs relating to them will be a significant growth area. Adding to that, AI/ML will push further into the contract processes, adding recommendations to workflow, guidance to different users as they enter CLM applications and deeper analytics/insights.”
Tariq Hafeez, Co-Founder and President, LegalEase Solutions: “We expect to see a lot of activity in 2023 around responding to data subject access requests (DSARs)—why? California’s new privacy rights act (CPRA) takes effect January 1, 2023 and allows individuals (including employees) to submit DSARs to get copies of any personal information collected, which will open a floodgate of requests to which companies will have to respond to within a short period of time. The review and redaction of information pursuant to these requests will supply a significant amount of work to service providers in the document review space, and technology vendors will continue to sell and upsell review platforms based on this acute need.”
https://www.law.com/legaltechnews/2023/01/09/legal-techs-predictions-for-e-discovery-in-2023/
Jim O’Hare, Vice President for CLM Services, LegalEase Solutions: “In 2022, we saw a growth in the number of CLM vendors providing NLP modules either embedded in their SaaS applications or as an add-on, the focus generally being to process third-party paper that the NLP models understood. This was certainly a significant enhancement for those vendors offering this ability. Quickly extracting text and converting that to metadata while at the same time extracting clauses to compare to gold standards started the CLM market down a powerful road. The automated creation of a contract record, with accurate metadata and the ability to compare language, was a big win for users.”
Patrice Asimakis, Director – Legal Services, LegalEase Solutions: “We know tech adoption has increased, both at firms and in legal departments. Technology, together with automation and process improvements, are only half the battle. The organizations that will thrive in the next few years are the ones that nail change management. Leaders need to get their people to adopt. Further, even in an organization that attains 100% willingness to adopt, there may still be a lack of tech understanding. The challenge will be staffing the tech. Those who can achieve both adoption willingness and a staff capable of learning/leveraging tech will outperform other organizations in their industry.”
Naseeha Machingal, Director – Client Success, LegalEase Solutions: “Every legal event in 2022 had at least 1-2 sessions focussing on lawyer burnout and the importance of wellness at workspace. In 2023, discussions around mental health will only increase. There will be technology like Headspace being implemented across legal departments. Legal departments and law firms need to focus on mental health discussions at the workplace and use applications to drive these conversations at work. Such law firms and corporations will attract the best legal talent.”
