Extract from Isha Marathe’s article “Lawyers’ Main Barriers With Tech Adoption: Organizational Challenges, Lack of Skills, and Fear”
Law firms and legal departments racing to understand, accommodate and even experiment with generative AI is a testament to just how technology-forward they’ve become over the past few years. But despite this change, technology adoption still faces considerable barriers in the legal market.
The Future Ready Lawyer 2023 survey conducted by Wolters Kluwer, which surveyed 700 lawyers in law firms, corporate legal departments, and business services firms across the U.S., the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Belgium, found burgeoning support among lawyers for tech adoption, including of generative AI. But in tandem with that trend, barriers and fears around the implementation of new tools are also considerable.
A majority, 73%, of respondents expect to integrate generative AI into their legal work within the next 12 months, while 68% said they felt prepared for the technology’s impact and 73% said they understood how it could be applied to their work, according to the report.
Ken Crutchfield, the vice president and general manager of legal markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal and Regulatory U.S., told Legaltech News that he found those numbers in line with not only lawyers’ interest in the technology, but also the initiatives they are already looking into launching.
