2021 Legal Predictions
2021 Legal Predictions

What Do Legal Professionals Expect in 2021? A New Survey Tells All

Enough looking backward at the year that was;  it’s time to look ahead and see where the changes wrought by COVID-19 and the unavoidably accelerated evolution of the legal industry are leading us.

To see what legal professionals expect, who better to consult than those professionals themselves?  So we did by conducting a legal industry survey about the challenges and changes ahead, one we teased you about a few weeks ago.  Here are some of the questions we got some very interesting answers about:

  • What are the biggest trends in legal tech in 2021?
  • What are the types of technologies organizations planning on investing in?
  • What are the metrics we all might want to start measuring?

Those are just a few of the questions we threw to top corporate legal leaders.  The objective of the survey? To capture predictions and opinions from legal department and Legal Operations members about the challenges, changes, and new legal tech they anticipate will be part of the legal business landscape in 2021.

Here are just a couple of examples of what’s revealed in the white paper we’ve created from that legal industry survey.

Legal tech is advancing

One opinion that was held by nearly all of our respondents?  That corporate legal technology will keep becoming more common and more advanced in the year ahead.  As to which specific technologies will see adoption in 2021, they had definite views:

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  • 44% said contract management would become more prevalent.
  • 42% said matter management.
  • 37% saw growth ahead in governance, risk, and compliance technologies.

Data privacy and security is a prime initiative

Another response that was nearly universal among our survey respondents?  That data privacy and security will be a major priority in 2021, and a huge impetus for this comes from the melee they lived through in 2020.

COVID-19 sent legal staff home to do their work, but that also demanded immediate policy and procedure revisions to mitigate the fresh risks involved.  Saddled with outmoded manual compliance processes, inadequate technologies and siloed data, some legal departments went through an extraordinarily rough transition, slowing down both them and the entire organization.  So it’s no wonder data privacy and the security of confidential information and documentation is on the “to-do” list for 2021.

2021 Legal Initiatives Chart

These are only a sampling of all the areas touched on in the white paper, “What Do Legal Professionals Expect from 2021?”  The legal industry survey gathered responses on a broad range of topics, from DNI initiatives to workflow automation and H1B1 hiring; we also include some juicy direct predictions from individual respondents on what they envision ahead.  To get your own copy, just use the link below.