It's interesting, because as a coder and lawyer I have the exact opposite view. Legal technology is a lot like coding technology -- there has been stuff invented since the mid 1990s, but it's all of debatable utility (see Paul Graham's articles on Lisp). What are these tools the capacity of which lawyers are underestimating? To me, legal tech seems a lot like the talk about how visual programming tools were going to make coders unnecessary.
The law (at least, litigation) involves marshalling precedent and facts to achieve persuasion. Circa 1990s tools like WestLaw are still the gold standard for legal research. And technological tools for collecting, organizing, and synthesizing facts are basically non-existent.
There is, in fact, market validation of the idea that legal technology is not particularly useful. You might argue that defense lawyers have disincentives to adopt technology that would reduce billable hours, but what about the other side of the v.? Plaintiffs' lawyers working on a contingency basis have enormous incentives to minimize effort invested in each case. Yet they don't.
> You might argue that defense lawyers have disincentives to adopt technology that would reduce billable hours, but what about the other side of the v.?
The US has a vast oversupply of lawyers (sure, star litigators make lots of money because they are in short supply, but they aren't the people whose labor legal technology aims to replace), which makes the value of reducing legal gruntwork low, plus to replace legal grunts using WestLaw or similar tools, you've got to either build on top of one the handful of such tools or duplicate it's corpus of annotated data and the massive infrastructure dedicated to keeping it current before you even get to the novel part of your tool, or you won't have anything usable.
So, it's a super high barrier to entry for a market where you are competing with cheap, abundant human labor.
The law (at least, litigation) involves marshalling precedent and facts to achieve persuasion. Circa 1990s tools like WestLaw are still the gold standard for legal research. And technological tools for collecting, organizing, and synthesizing facts are basically non-existent.
There is, in fact, market validation of the idea that legal technology is not particularly useful. You might argue that defense lawyers have disincentives to adopt technology that would reduce billable hours, but what about the other side of the v.? Plaintiffs' lawyers working on a contingency basis have enormous incentives to minimize effort invested in each case. Yet they don't.