What's next for NewLaw in 2022?

Based on their observations as to how NewLaw has developed in recent months, our Ashurst Advance leadership team give us their predictions on what lies ahead for the industry in the coming year and beyond.

Given the tide of legal services transformation momentum which has been built up and unleashed during 2021, the use of the term NewLaw will be phased out during 2022 . We will recognise there is a new benchmark for the delivery of legal services delivery set by clear client expectations, with a laser focus on process, resources and technology being an integral part of that delivery solution. And someone will invent a new term for next generation NewLaw!
Mike Polson, Partner, Head of Ashurst Advance Delivery

We expect demand for and adoption of legal project management (LPM) services by clients to continue to grow as they have become used to the efficiencies and benefits delivered through advanced approaches in legal service delivery. This demand will be underpinned by further integration of legal process and continuous improvement approaches with legal project management delivery, in turn eliminating waste and enhancing lawyers' and clients' experience when collaborating on business projects.

To meet increased demand and achieve even better outcomes LPM practitioners and lawyers need smart legal project management technology to support the delivery of a maturing service and further enhance our clients' experience.
Helga Butcher, Interim Head of Legal Project Management and Process Improvement (EMEA) and Renee Amundsen, Head of Legal Project Management and Process Improvement (APAC)

We should expect further consolidation in the LegalTech market and more smaller suppliers to fail. It feels like, though it has felt like this for a while, we have reached peak LegalTech in terms of crazy valuations and the numbers of new entrants with overlapping solutions. For example, the broad availability of Google BERT models seems linked to the proliferation of Contract Analysis tools. As a legal tech consumer, of course we welcome choice and competition in the market but it's hard to see current numbers being sustainable.

Despite this consolidation, the main blockers for a law firm's purchase of legal tech still won't be properly addressed: interoperability, consistency of security policies, sandboxes and simple trials.
Chris Boulter, Head of Digital Products EMEA

2022 will see a continued shift towards ever closer collaboration between law firms and in-house teams. This will involve true partnerships where law firms become viewed as an extension of the in-house team both by those teams and by a client's internal stakeholders. Clients expect efficient and effective delivery in terms of how a law firm executes work from their side as standard but they will increasingly expect firms to provide support to in-house teams around their own processes as part of a broader collaborative solution design where clients and law firms work in a streamlined, integrated manner. This type of value add will become routinely expected by in-house lawyers over and above mere task execution by their law firm partners.

For some time one of the most persistent trends within the eDiscovery market has been the move away from an on premise or on demand approach to eDiscovery towards managed services or self-service SaaS (software as a service) solutions. This trend looks set to continue into 2022 as law firms and their clients look for solutions to their eDiscovery challenges that are scalable and combine cost savings with process efficiencies, as well as ensuring that the software they use remains state of the art. In tandem with this development I expect to see software and service providers develop how they provide these SaaS services so that they offer a more versatile and seamless end to end solution which addresses the different stages within the eDiscovery life cycle.

Mark Simmons, Co-Head of eDiscovery Services


Law firm clients will influence more and more the technology choices of law firms. Firms will increasingly need to work within client environments, CLM for example, as opposed to joint collaboration spaces. Expertise in the core CLM tools will become increasingly valuable and sought after.
Tae Royle, Head of Digital Products APAC



The rapid rise of NewLaw and legal technology has provided firms and their clients with a raft of different capabilities to enable a more efficient and effective delivery of legal services. However, the fragmented landscape, which spans multiple technologies, skill-sets, resourcing and delivery models, means that much of the potential benefit still remains untapped. Whilst innovation and new ideas will always be important, the constant pursuit of the next big thing can overlook the capabilities that organisations already have at their disposal but are just not using effectively. Firms that can master the concept of "systems integration", bringing together elements of people, process and technology in ways that create holistic platforms and seamless experiences that are repeatable and scalable for their clients, will quickly move to the fore
Scott Mackintosh, Head of Operations and Projects

Amid recent discussion of the "Great Resignation", we anticipate that 2022 will see significant movement in the legal talent market and particularly early in the new year as candidates give greater consideration to their career needs and goals. While retention will be front of mind for most organisations, 2022 will also present an opportunity to reassess resourcing needs and take advantage of the availability of new talent. We foresee demand for flexible talent will continue its upward trajectory as firms and in-house legal teams continue to resource to the core and use flexible resources to meet peaks in workloads, fill short-term skill requirements or to backfill newly vacated positions.

As we saw in 2021, the importance of geographic location of team members will continue to decrease as organisations enter a post-pandemic market and emphasis will instead be placed on desirable skills and cost. From a talent perspective, this will provide greater choice of opportunities and allow for career pivots in trying new specialties and/or industries.
Linda Grace, Head of Ashurst Advance Reach

In 2020/21, all industries were in flux, but the road ahead in 2022 now seems clearer. Clients now have access to a wide range of technology and understand the opportunities this brings. The internal disruption within in-house teams has provided an open door to explore change together, which is already having a significant impact and is an opportunity to think about where law firms' value-add fits in in a broader sense. Whether that's a complete agile workflow solution/service on a discrete matter or forming part of a process run and managed in-house – becoming an extension of our clients' businesses. This period of rapid change has provided a fantastic opportunity to transform the way law firms work with our clients.

2022 is an excellent opportunity for law firms to be bold together with our clients and demonstrate value-add as a business that utilises all of its people and wider expertise by selling its whole self, not just high-quality legal advice.
Matt Goff, Head of Digital Services

The use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) will become more common. With Nuix buying software company Topos Labs, and more organisations building pre-built NLP models to solve the problem of a 'cold start' specifically for cartel investigations and employment disputes, we will continue to see an expansion in its adoption and new use cases for this form of AI.
Phil Smith, Co-Head of eDiscovery Services

2022 will see recognition that the Microsoft stack is broadly good enough for many legal applications, adoption of these more generic and widely available capabilities, and the subsequent narrowing of what we think of as 'legal tech'. Teams, Sharepoint, Power BI, Azure SQL hit a number of sweet spots, and the cost of is relatively low - most businesses already have these and skill sets in these areas.

If you would like to speak to the Ashurst Advance team about our NewLaw offering and how we can help our clients find innovative and cost-effective solutions to their legal challenges, please don't hesitate to get in touch.