Advocates are at the heart of every community, working tirelessly to help and support their clients, be it to facilitate businesses or provide valuable personal advice –we Advocates are here to help. The essential role of a lawyer is to assist our clients to the best of our abilities and uphold the rule of law; this has not changed, but the way we do our jobs has progressed simultaneously with the world we live in. Across our society we are at present going through unmatched rates of economic and technological transformations. As our clients work hard to respond to these changes, we as professionals will have to rise to the challenge, and technology offers huge opportunities for lawyers to innovate in ways, which benefit their clients and them, as well as the technology innovators that assist them.
It’s just kind of embedded in our core that we’re constantly looking at the quality of our work and how to improve it. And if one doesn’t have that ethos, they just rapidly fall behind because of the competition. It is about improvement of value to our clients and also liberation of lawyers to do the things they do really well, for which we can recover, and that our clients would really value. So nothing about innovation changes our stratagem. Innovation, we are going to use to augment what we presently offer and improve our client proposition. That’s a very important part of it.
Technology is becoming an ever more central part of our social and commercial interactions, enabling businesses to study us as much as we engage with them. This greater wealth of data may raise privacy and security concerns for some, but it also brings a newfound utility to the customer experience and a shift towards a seamless means of transacting that, for many far supersedes any privacy fears. Law firms that invest in technology and other means to better understand their clients and their needs will be able to design more tailored solutions. Agile resourcing of solutions will assist firms in better understanding their margins and set pricing strategies accordingly. Those deploying sophisticated pricing engines that make relevant and insightful solutions more affordable to clients are those most likely to retain a competitive edge for their business.
Admission to justice is understood as the aptitude for people to address their routine legal problems, either through recourses to courts or other forums. It is estimated that globally, around 4 billion people live outside the reach of the law, and do not have the security, opportunity or protection to redress their grievances and injustices. Challenges of right of entry to justice can be manifested in multiple ways; these include where courts and legal institutions are out of reach of plaintiffs for reasons of costs, reserve or even a absence of knowledge of rights and prerogatives. It can also be triggered because numerous judicial associations are under-funded and as a result, there is deprived infrastructure, scarcity of staff and limited resources to cater to the needs and demands of litigants who require such services. In various occasions the text of law itself is riddled with complications and that makes it problematic to understand and used efficiently. Access to justice can thus be an expensive perception that has symbolic, financial, informational, and structural implications for battles against poverty, inequality, violence, and a lack of progress. Technological advancement in the legal profession that sees access to justice as a key driver for building peaceful and inclusive societies is the need of the hour.
I, for instance, have been using the technological advancements like instant messaging to keep my clients updated with their case status and sending them documents and petitions for reading prior to them coming to my office for finalization, thereby reducing the time required to finalize the draft of the petition or whatever document there might be. The High Court of Bombay, where I regularly take up cases, have also adopted the technological advancements with open heart as almost everything in the High Court has been digitized and accessible to Lawyers as well as litigants.
There is a saying that, if one doesn’t change course with the changing winds, they will be broken apart by the sheer force of nature. The new innovations that we keep seeing every day in our day to day lives fits the above saying perfectly. The new generation of lawyers, e.g. my brother Advocate Saif Mobhani, are even better at adapting to technological advancements that are offered on the platter, which the old crop such as us are not able to comprehend at such breathtaking speed.
The legal proverb of the process established by the law is changing every minute as the courts embrace technology, be it serving of summons through instant messaging apps or marking the presence of the litigating party sitting 1000 miles away through video conferencing, it is either we adept or we perish.
About the Author:
Advocate Shelina Mobhani is one of the leading lawyers in Mumbai who specializes in the fields of civil disputes and matrimonial Cases. Getting her Sanad in 2008, she has completed 10 fruitful years in this profession serving the society, one case at a time.
