COVID-19 has accelerated the push toward digital business transformation for most businesses, and legal and compliance leaders are under pressure to anticipate both the potential improvements and possible risks that come with new legal technology innovations, according to Gartner.
To address this challenge, the Gartner Hype Cycle for Legal and Compliance Technologies, 2020 lists the 31 must watch legal technologies to allow legal and compliance leaders to identify innovations that will allow them to act faster. They can use this information for internal planning and prioritization of emerging innovations.
Legal and compliance leaders must address complex business demand by investing in technologies and practices to better anticipate, identify and manage risks, while seeking out opportunities to contribute to growth.
“Legal and compliance leaders must collaborate with other stakeholders to garner support for organization wide and function wide investments in technology,” said Zack Hutto, director in the Gartner Legal and Compliance practice. “They must address complex business demand by investing in technologies and practices to better anticipate, identify and manage risks, while seeking out opportunities to contribute to growth.”
According to Gartner analysts, enterprise legal management (ELM), subject rights requests (SRRs), predictive analytics, and robotic process automation (RPA) are likely to be most beneficial for the majority of legal and compliance organizations within a few years. They are also likely to help with the increased need for cost optimization and unplanned legal work arising from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Legal application leaders and general counsel must begin with their desired business outcomes, and only then find a technology that can help deliver those outcomes.
The demand for subject rights requests (SRRs) is growing along with the number of regulations that enshrine a data subject’s right to access their data and request amendment or deletion.
Predictive analysis is a well-established technology and the market is mature, so it can be relatively simple to use “out-of-the-box” or via a cloud service. “Adoption of this technology in legal and compliance is typically less mature than other business functions,” said Hutto.
RPA’s potential to streamline workflows for repetitive, rule-based tasks is already well-established in other business functions. Typically, RPA is best suited to systems with a standardized — often legacy — user interfaces for which scripts can be written.
“Where legal departments already use these types of systems it is likely that RPA can drive higher efficiency,” said Hutto.