Artificial Lawyer: “Legal tech is going to vanquish inefficiency in the legal world…….or is it? To do that legal tech needs to overcome one of the paradoxical impacts of innovation, namely that improvements in technology result in demand expansion or new input needs, which then jam up the system again with inefficiency. You then need new solutions to solve the problem. A classic example here is the way that contracts are easier to create now compared to, for example the 1980s, with digital templating, word processing, email or online negotiation spaces, and then DMS and KM systems. Today, most lawyers in their 60s will tell you that contracts, at least in the US and UK, are far longer and more complex today than in the past. One reason, (other than an expansion in regulation, which is itself often connected to technological advances), is simply that being able to make contracts more easily tends to make them longer. As Neil Peretz, an experienced lawyer and founder of Contract Wrangler (which has just been bought by Conga) told Artificial Lawyer: ‘If I had to write a contract with a typewriter it would be a lot shorter than the contracts of today.’ And our chat inspired this article…”