Almost every industry has been affected by the expansion of information and communications technology, from medicine to finance to entertainment. A practitioner plucked from each of those fields 30 years ago would find it difficult to recognize the modern equivalent in 2014. However, the legal field has not changed in a similar way. While there has been some progress over the past decades (including online legal research, e-filing, e-discovery, and outsourcing) legal practice today still bears quite a bit of resemblance to legal practice in 1984.

But a major shift is emerging. Innovators and entrepreneurs are now applying powerful technological concepts and approaches (e.g. the cloud, Big Data, artificial intelligence) to the practice of law, and the pace of change is accelerating. In short, technology has improved significantly while legal practitioners and the courts drag their feet.

Today’s legal system is still very much tied to geography and jurisdiction. To decide how to resolve a legal case it first must be established which law applies. The same case can potentially get very different outcomes based on which law governs the resolution process. These days, however, which law applies is no longer a simple question to answer. A buyer in Brazil may purchase an item from a seller in France off of a marketplace based in the U.S., and the item may be shipped directly to the buyer from a warehouse in China. Which law applies should a problem arise? And if the item is only worth $100, would any lawyer be willing to take the case to hammer out the complex jurisdictional questions?

The law is being transformed by technology at the pace societies demand it transform, not the pace preferred by legal practitioners. The only question that remains is whether this transformation will take one, two, five or 10 years to fully play out. Once it is complete, online resolution of issues will become the new normal: no longer seen as particularly novel or innovative. We probably won’t even remember how we used to resolve issues back in the Dark Ages before technology. The challenge in front of us is navigating this transition so that it provides speedy access to justice and increases fair outcomes for more people around the world.

Read more: www.lawtechnologynews.com/id=1202676796530/Vendor-Voice-Dispute-Resolution-Evolution#ixzz3Jhjt3YvQ

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