The legal profession provides plenty of challenges and pain points for industry professionals, with around 80% of lawyers admitting to frequent high stress levels.

It’s thus no wonder that legal clients struggle with stress when their lives hang in the balance throughout a complicated process that can be difficult to understand.

Keep reading as we explore four trends in legal technology shaping the profession’s future and carving out space for more wellness and stress management for legal professionals.

Why Is The Legal Process So Stressful For Clients?

It’s safe to say that the legal profession is well-suited to academics, philosophers, and intellectuals – but for the average person, it is overwhelming. Let’s explore some of the reasons why legal processes can cause undue stress to clients.

Difficulty Understanding Legal Jargon

Legal jargon is arch and complicated to say the least. And, this adds to a client’s feeling of lack of control during the legal process. Since lawyers often don’t have the time to explain all legal documents to clients, it can lead to stress as clients do not clearly understand the process that could severely impact their lives.

The Personal Aspect Of Legal Issues

During legal proceedings, a client may have custody of children, assets, and even a criminal record on the line. The weight of the consequences of failure in court can lead to a huge burden of stress for clients. Even making court appearances can cause anxiety, making statements and watching legal battles that affect you personally.

Costly Legal Representation

Legal representation isn’t cheap, and the longer a court process goes on, the more the legal fees rise. As longer court proceedings go on, the client can become fatigued and increasingly worried about their finances, which may lead to hasty decisions in attempts to keep the process short.

4 Trends In Legal Technology Shaping The Future Of The Profession

Let’s explore some of the top tools and technologies that remove the burden of stress for legal clients and revolutionize legal processes.

Self-Serve Justice

Self-serve justice platforms, like JusticeDirect, are changing the way people learn and participate in legal proceedings.

JusticeDirect is singularly devoted to improving legal accessibility for the average person, which is why they have merged with another company, People Clerk, with similar aims. Both companies have pooled their resources to create legal technology for the people, driven by the best-combined minds in the industry.

Most legal clients or small businesses do not have the legal literacy required to understand the events of the case without extensive communication with their lawyers. However, this tool is designed to provide legal clients with the information needed to understand complex legal processes and even represent themselves in a court of law.

Legal professionals can also take advantage of this tool to provide self-learning resources for clients, ensuring they feel empowered and educated throughout their legal processes. This will help to lower the amount of client communication attached to each case, significantly lowering the burden of a legal team.

Legal Chatbots

Legal professionals can also take advantage of legal chatbots to handle brief client queries without the need for back-and-forth emails, which could leave room for misunderstanding.

Email queries can take a significant amount of time to fully address, and can be entirely outsourced with sophisticated legal chatbots, created by legal professionals within the team to provide specific information.

By leveraging this technology, legal firms can be more present for their clients – without the billable hours charge.

AI

AI proves extremely useful in helping clients perform their own research throughout the legal process, allowing them to review case law and other valuable resources in layman’s terms. With this ability, they can thoroughly review the argument presented in court to feel more empowered and aware throughout the legal process.

It can also prove useful regarding client-facing communication, as AI decoders can transform legal documents into layman’s terms, allowing regular people to be more informed about their legal endeavors.

Automation

A large portion of a legal professional’s role is data entry. With modern automation technologies, data entry can be performed without manual intervention. This will, in turn, reduce the average legal professional’s workload while reducing the potential for human error for more accurate and consistent records.

It will also free up their time to interact with clients and provide more hands-on representation, which can prove extremely useful to those in distressing legal situations, feeling as though they lack control.