The pandemic is causing delays. Not within Legal.

The world is always on the move and that is certainly true for the legal world. Lawyers face new challenges every day. This applies to challenges specific to their field, but also to the challenges within their industry.

Many law and notary firms have invested significantly in the automation and digitization of their work and processes within the last two years. An investment that is absolutely necessary to be able to keep up in 2021. It is therefore not a surprise that many Venture Capital organizations target law firms and other legal organizations. Statistics show that there is a lot of potential and therefore a lot can be achieved. This is, of course, music to a VC investor’s ears.

The investments that are made are mainly aimed at increasing productivity, offering better legal services and products with an increasing quality at lower costs. Despite the fact that the legal industry has a reputation for being slow in adopting technology, now one might say the contrary.

Legal start-ups are springing up worldwide that focus on offering legal and notarial services via/through the internet. Think of setting up a company quickly and easily, transferring shares or drawing up a cohabitation contract. Nowadays it can be done very quickly with a few clicks of a button. Some legal veterans will now no doubt jump out of their seats and say this is not possible. Often because the piece of customization is forgotten. Yet this is today’s reality.

Smart contracts, legal databases with artificial intelligence and natural language processing, it’s all out there. We as CheckHub also belong to the list of Legal Tech organizations. Once started as a startup with a focus on Legal and HR and now a partner of very large legal and HR organizations such as Randstad. Recently, we have seen increasing demand and pressure within the legal world. Sometimes people read that the arrival of Covid-19 has caused projects and business to come to a standstill. Within legal, this is actually the opposite. The pressure on efficiency, the adequate and timely handling of customer cases has only increased. Where organizations used to try to fill this with hands, this is now done with sustainable technical solutions. 

We also see another shift. In the past, a law firm or notary’s office was more of a commodity. You need a contract or notarial document and look for the office that is the best in terms of location and price. However, consumers are becoming more critical. The reputation of any company is critically evaluated on the internet and this is now even more true for legal organizations. The consumer is the customer and the customer is king. 

We at CheckHub think this is a positive development. It forces organizations to evaluate even more critically their services and processes. Organizations that have already performed well will perform even better. Organizations that leave gaps now have the opportunity to fill them adequately and sustainably through technology. The success of the average organization in the near future will not depend on the quality of your work or prices for it. But, from the perception of the customers. We therefore strongly advise organizations to respond to this in good time. Especially now it is still possible.

Richard