2022 trends for the legal industry
And how translation could diminish costs.
Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash
Certain industries impact people’s lives in highly direct ways. Even Pandemics can’t stop it. For example, we are cut through by the law every day, we live, work and abide by it. People need lawyers, from marriage to deaths, work and travel, and beyond, and so trends in the legal industry accompany these needs. As markets grow, contracts go international. Marriages bring together countries, visas are required to study abroad, residency applications are more and more common. And all of these need translating in all languages involved.
How has all this changed legal work and how does it reflect in trends for the future? What does 2022 have in store for us?
The new law is not always easy to define. It commonly refers to the idea of providing legal services in entirely new ways. This means a certain group of lawyers one day broke with how things were usually done and started reaching out to clients with strategies that would have been inconceivable. It is also defined as a fast-growing market that reached nearly $11 billion as of 2017, Thomson Reuters estimates.
It is said that two features of New Law stand out – the extensive use of Legal Tech and the adoption of alternative pricing models. So now legal services can be provided via apps and softwares in a more efficient and widespread way. Sharing territories is no longer the limit. The different laws dictated in each country can be mended with new partnerships. Language barriers can be avoided by outsourcing interpretation and translation in a low-cost practical manner.
Big law firms, on the other hand, have the infrastructure to provide assistance for other big firms and players. But they also have a reputation for being very expensive. This doesn’t mean everything should be now run under new law since there is a very practical side to the traditional way of doing things (say, having everything centralized under one legal figure which will take care and follow up on your needs) that overweighs cost. But, being able to hire lawyers on a contract basis enables flexibility to respond to new types of challenges.
This breaking down of the law to reduce all kinds of expenses and make your firm more agile forecasts revenues of over thirty-five billion. One growing way of doing this is outsourcing services that aren’t strictly necessary to have in my stably operating team.
For example, Electronic Discovery, commonly known as e-discovery, is the process of reviewing information that is or may become evidence. It’s called electronic discovery because in this day and age, most documents will probably be digital or should be digitalized and sorted by a dedicated team from the inside.
Now, the digitalization of documents, or the need to translate electronic records that may not be in your native language in order to understand them and make them clear to anyone reading it, is a process that can be outsourced. Either with an international team from the origin country of the source, or with native language professionals from companies such as ours, LST, that rapidly pairs you with experts that can trustingly help you out.
The law and its guardians, at the end of the day, focus on protecting people’s rights. Achieving effective and reliable communication, and providing confidentiality and safe processes.
On the one hand, legal systems are bound up with the specific culture and legal history and are resolved in different ways in different countries, through different institutions, based on terms of specific technical structures tailored to individual legal systems (Groot, 1991). So to achieve effective, reliable communication, the expertise of the legal translators to understand, interpret and produce legal texts depending on the legal systems and languages is adamant.
On the other, confidentiality and safety processes are not negotiable, especially with the quickly escalating adoption of legal tech tools. One top law firm reported experiencing a 70% increase in phishing attempts since the pandemic began, and as Law.com points out, “IT Managers have gone from managing 400 people in one office to having 400 single-person offices.”All that is needed to fail is for just one of those hundreds of phishing attempts to successfully breakthrough, so remediating this situation with proper safety nets and digital procedures will be on everyone’s horizon.
One of the variables that triggers increased demand is the baby boomer effect. Retirement planning and testaments from countries with a now very ample topped demographic pyramid generate a workflow that sometimes exceeds the country’s capabilities, and opens a window of opportunity for international firms to harness new clients.
Again, overseas markets come hand in hand with the need to translate:
Amongst others such as legal interpretation, the previously mentioned e-discovery support, document production, transcription, and legal localization.
Is your firm aligned with these incoming trends? 2022 has many exciting challenges coming up, and at LST we can help you take on them all. Discover how we can diminish costs and maximize impact with our language solutions.
Ask for a one-hour free assessment