Proceedings of the 45th International Academic Conference, London

TECHNOLOGY AND LEGAL PRACTICE: A REVOLUTIONARY NEXUS

ARPIT AGARWAL

Abstract:

Humans, as a race, have been persistently pushing themselves to ensure that the future which awaits us to be more tech-savvy and lesser labour-oriented. Pervasion of technology and scientific innovations has ensured that minimal reliance be made upon human efforts. It would, thus not be farfetched to assert that today we have more faith in the efficacy of such inventions than on self-efforts and rightly so, for the accuracy and sharpness being offered by such tools of modern era are well beyond comparison to those reflected by the efforts of homo sapiens. A conscious shift of the litigation sector towards technology has resulted in providing this already thriving industry with further impetus and has brought with itself manifold boons, be it in the form of research expediency, administrative purposes, file management, or even in predicting the favourability of the expected judgement. Also, it has led to the advent of ancillary sector in the form of those providing necessary interface and software environment for the aforesaid purposes. Technology has transgressed the legal sector not merely in the form of necessary software equipment; but even the development of other aspects of technology like computer hardware, Internet, E-Mail, Mobile Devices, and quite recently, Cloud services have been playing their own significant part. However, technological invasion has also had its share of disadvantages in the form of increased privacy risk and vulnerability of computer systems to name a few. This paper thus, intends to deal at length with the history of technological development in the legal domain and highlight the advantages, the disadvantages, hindrances and future prospects of it. It also seeks to answer pertinent questions like: “Will it affect the paralegal sector?” “Can it supersede the role of a litigator?” “How far can it economize litigation practice?”

Keywords: Technology, Economize, Paralegal, Litigation.

DOI: 10.20472/IAC.2019.045.001

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