In law firms and in-house legal teams worldwide, questions about how best to prepare for the future and how to stay competitive in a rapidly changing legal sector are never far from lawyers’ minds. With a dynamic legal sector and many innovative law firms, the Nordic region is no exception to this. At a recent Luminance Webinar, Elinor Skarby Hay, Associate at leading Swedish law firm Mannheimer Swartling, spoke to Luminance about her perspective on the future of the Nordic legal sector.

An innovative lawyer is an effective lawyer

To provide the best service for clients, Nordic lawyers are increasingly utilising the power of new technologies available to them. In Elinor’s experience. "compared to a few years ago, law firms are adopting new technologies all the time … finding the best solutions is now part of a lawyer’s work". To continue delivering for customers, many of whom are asking lawyers to do more for less in light of the difficult financial climate, the best lawyers need to have access to the tools which enable them to make better use of the time and skills. For Elinor this is not just a question of purchasing technologies when a challenge is encountered – being proactive is key. “When you have new technology you need to adopt, you need to learn it and you need to have everything in place for when you need to use it.” To effectively prepare for the future, therefore, lawyers need to anticipate challenges they might encounter and then integrate new tools into their work.

In Elinor’s view, the future of the legal profession in the Nordic region is one in which technology plays an ever-greater role. AI and other cutting-edge technology will enable lawyers to meet changing client needs. Increasingly the most successful lawyers and legal teams will be those who identify the best technologies, integrate them into their work and use them to provide a quality service. Elinor calls on lawyers to embrace AI – such technology actually enhances the lawyers’ primary role as trusted advisors. As Elinor put it, while Luminance cuts through the repetitive work of document review "you’re still doing the analysis, you’re still evaluating the documents, you’re still the lawyer."

Cutting through growing data volumes

Elinor’s assessment of the Nordic legal sector and the legal technology world was positive, arguing that lawyers in the region are open to change but that "there is a lot of potential for improvement and there are a lot of potential solutions out there." Luminance is already being used by firms across the Nordic region as a vital tool to empower lawyers. Luminance uses a unique blend of supervised machine learning and unsupervised machine learning to read and form an understanding of documents, highlighting key information such clauses, datapoints and anomalies. This is an invaluable asset to lawyers encountering rapidly growing data volumes. According to the International Data Corporation, worldwide data creation will grow to 163 zettabytes by 2025, ten times the amount of data produced in 2017. To cut through huge amounts of enterprise data and find key documents, lawyers need to dramatically increase efficiency. In Elinor’s words “Luminance enables you to take on a data set which wouldn’t be possible otherwise … we need solutions like Luminance because a manual review is no longer realistic.”

With Luminance, lawyers are able to meet the changing demands of their clients, leveraging the power of AI to increase efficiency and continue to provide a quality service, whatever the challenges of the future.