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| {{a|tech|}}
| | #redirect[[legaltech]] |
| ===Why is reg tech so disappointing?===
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| [[Document assembly]] has been around for a good 15 years — they thought it was “Lawyer-killing disruptive technology” in 2006<ref>See Darrel R Mountain’s OUP monograph on the subject from 2006 [https://academic.oup.com/ijlit/article-abstract/15/2/170/683915 “Disrupting Conventional Law Firm Business Models using Document Assembly”]</ref> and, well, the cockroaches — ''we'' cockroaches — are still here, ladies and gentlemen, and [[document assembly]] technology ''still'' doesn't work very well. | |
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| Why?
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| They say any sufficiently sophisticated technology is indistinguishable from magic. Here, “sufficiently sophisticated” is measured relative to the eye of the beholders. When those beholders are denizens of the [[legal]] and [[compliance]] department - especially when they hail from the department's [[chief operating officer|chief operating office]] - one doesn't have to be awfully sophisticated to appear magical, especially in a pilot or a proof of concept. Just airily drop in expressions like “[[blockchain]]”, [“[chatbot]]”, “[[natural language processing]]”, “[[algorithm]]” and “[[AI]]” and you will sail through.
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| And so you do. Thus it should come as no surprise that [[reg tech]] really isn't that clever in the first place. It is sold by big-talking<ref>[[blockchain]], [[chatbots]], [[AI]] - you know go you are. </ref> small-thinking, big-blagging startups who are faking it till they make it. '' If your [[reg tech]] was started by a guy who was an associate at Shearman it isn't going to be much chop''. I mean, is it?
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| If you want to see real AI and real powerful algorithms at work have a look at a modern [[digital audio workstation]] like Apple’s [[Logic Pro X]].
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| *Doesn’t disintermediate: still requires [[external IT]] (SAAS, right?), internal [[IT]], [[Chief Operating Officer|management]], procurement, a process through which whatever value the concept offered will be bloated, deprecated, rigidised and commoditised to the point where using the tool is a ''chore''. An imposition. *
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| *Doesn’t provide user flexibility: [[policy]] will see to that. The product will calcify, it being too hard, requiring to many approvals and too many business cases to develop.
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| *Doesn’t provide out of the box usable content: to be usable the will require lawyers, and there are generally precious few of those, and they generally are refuseniks and low-cost-location rent-a-seat types who can follow instructions but aren't any good at ''writing'' them.
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| What none of this does is put useful tools in the hands of the user.
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| Compare with the model of music apps. The tech is genuinely ground-breaking, the user interface is designed to be manned by the user, the expectation is no software-as-a-service ''because the software is so intuitive you don't need it''.
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| {{ref}}
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