The legal and property industries have, arguably, been slower than most to take up technology and embrace big data in the digital age. But the reality is that, for many years, they didn’t have to. Compare the traditional conveyancer or estate agent with some of their high street neighbours, such as retailers, banks or building societies; the internet forced many of them to start shifting their business online over a decade ago. Meanwhile, professional property and legal services were largely insulated from the online revolution. But now we are seeing digital and data-driven competition heat up, with technology an essential tool of productivity.

A newly published survey by the Law Society Junior Lawyer’s Division has found that extreme stress affects a quarter of young lawyers. This highlights a worrying trend that we have been tracking for some time: young solicitors unable to cope and lacking proper support from their employers. Burnout, other health issues and increased negligence risk are the obvious by-products of extreme stress. However, the trend in the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal suggests that professional ethics may also be a casualty of the ‘sink or swim’ approach to professional development.

How to convert more leads into clients is a question every law firm would like to know the answer to. Every business, in fact, would benefit from understanding the secret of turning an interested party into a fee-paying client. It doesn’t matter how many potential clients a firm may have, if the individuals working for the firm are not skilled in transforming them into clients, they could be losing these opportunities and therefore not delivering the return on investment on the firm’s marketing spend.

New entrants, increased client expectation and continuing fee pressure have shifted the battle ground of legal services to the client experience. In this rapidly evolving landscape, firms are realising they will live or die based on the customer experience and technology will play a key role in defining that. While the importance of technology is increasingly recognised in the legal sector, few firms are using technology to define intellectual property and value in the way other service companies are. Think about Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, LinkedIn – they all position themselves as a tech business first. Retail, hotel rooms, taxis and recruitment are just by-products of their platforms. It begs the question: when will we start to see law firms think in a similar way?

We need to move away from using technology to try and recreate the thought-process of a lawyer. The idea is not to build a lawyer’s brain, although we may well want to approximate some of its features. Rather, the potential tech offers is in designing a system that arrives at a similar, if not a more accurate or informed outcome as a lawyer might, by building on the strengths that computers have that humans do not, namely: the ability to simultaneously process large amounts of data, to calculate probabilities more accurately, and to identify patterns and relationships that exist across a large evidence base.