Emerging Trends and Technologies

Note: This article is just one of 60+ sections from our full report titled: The 2024 Legal AI Retrospective - Key Lessons from the Past Year. Please download the full report to check any citations.

V. Emerging Trends and Technologies

The legal AI landscape is rapidly evolving, with several key trends and technologies shaping the future of the industry. This section explores the most significant developments and their potential impact on legal practice.

• Advanced NLP
• Explainable AI - Democratization of Contract Law and Market Standards

"With perhaps the most rapid change in legal tech since the PC's invention, AI is transforming the legal services market and redefining what it means to be a lawyer from 2025 onwards"

Gav Ward, Ex-BigLaw Solicitor, UK

Trend 1: Advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Looking ahead, we anticipate:

1. Development of NLP-powered legal tools with both multilingual and cross-jurisdictional capabilities
2. More seamless collaboration between NLP-driven tools and human legal practitioners
3. Increased reliance on NLP-powered Legal AI tools as a valuable assistant, allowing legal professionals to focus on high-level strategic thinking and creative problem-solving

These developments have collectively pushed the boundaries of what's possible in NLP, and in the Legal domain, enabling more sophisticated language understanding and generation across a wide range of legal applications.

"AI is transformative, which is both exciting and intimidating. Not only does it challenge the traditional conception of legal practice, but it also invites us to reconsider fundamental questions about the meaning of intelligence, the nature of legal reason, and even human nature itself"

Kevin P. Lee, Professor of Law, North Carolina, USA