As technology, and especially artificial intelligence, becomes increasingly integrated into our daily lives, everyone has started asking the same question: Are legal professions still pen-and-paper professions? The legal world has long been accustomed to hours of research, manually tracked case processes, and losing documents among folders full of paperwork. In the last decade, however, law has begun to take center stage in digital transformation, and the name of this change is Legal Tech, or legal technologies. So, what exactly is legal tech? In this blog series, I will try to explain what legal tech is and help make it easier to adapt to the changing world.

DEFINITION AND HISTORY OF LEGAL TECH

The relationship between science and imagination, which has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, dates back centuries. Ancient Greek writers Homer and Hephaestus supposedly said that one day the gods would create humanoid robots to save humanity. With each advancement in technology, humanity has dreamed of the next stage, approaching these developments with hesitation on one hand while always imagining more on the other. While robots doing our work was a prophecy of the very recent past, it has now become a reality, and for us lawyers, the name of this reality is Legal Tech.

Legal Tech, the entirety of digital-based solutions used in the field of law, in its simplest definition, refers to the automation of legal processes through digital tools, making them faster and more efficient. For example, e-notification systems used in today's Turkey, AI-based case analysis processes, and digital execution and case tracking software are all parts of Legal Tech.

The need for technology in legal professions has always been on the agenda of the technology world, but the development of these technologies began in the second half of the 20th century. The online legal research terminal developed by Lexis in 1973 digitized the case law research that lawyers spent hours doing in libraries, freeing them from a great burden and time, and made its mark on the field of legal technologies. Interestingly, law firms began purchasing fax machines around the same time.

By the 1990s, the proliferation of personal computers and word processors accelerated document preparation processes, and in the 2000s, law firms adopted email, digital document archiving, and databases. In the last decade, cloud computing, e-signatures, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models completely changed the way law operates. In the past 5 years, with the emergence of artificial intelligence, the legal world, along with the entire world, has reached a turning point.

TYPES AND SCOPE OF LEGAL TECH

The Legal Tech spectrum can generally be divided into 8 main categories:

1. Legal research and legislation databases
2. Document preparation and contract automation
3. Cloud-based solutions
4. Digital communication and integration tools (E-Filing & CourtTech)
5. Contract review and AI-assisted analysis (CLM)
6. E-Discovery (electronic evidence review) and case management systems
7. Law firm management and administrative tools

Many Legal Tech products exist under these main headings, which we will discuss in detail in a later article, and all these tools have emerged from the efficiency needs of the legal world. Tasks that took lawyers hours in yesterday's world, such as document scanning, case law research, comparing similar contracts, and searching volumes of legislation, have become tasks that take seconds in today's world thanks to Legal Tech.

According to 2023 data published by Fortune Business Insights, it has been determined that legal departments save approximately 40% of time on routine tasks thanks to the use of Legal Tech software. With the different Legal Tech products developed in the areas we mentioned and under these areas, lawyers have begun to spend less of their time on "copy-paste work" and more on high-value areas such as client consultation, strategy development, and academic research.

Furthermore, such rapid development has fundamentally changed client expectations. Clients expect the lawyers they work with to use technology and keep up with the changing world. Corporate clients, aware that some routine tasks can be completed much faster thanks to technology, do not appreciate their lawyers keeping them waiting for long periods using traditional methods and demand that their work be made as efficient as possible. For all these reasons, although the legal sector is inherently slow to adapt to developments, it has reached a point where it cannot ignore technological developments, and technology has taken a large slice from intra-sector competition.

LEGAL TECH IN THE WORLD

Today, the value of artificial intelligence in the legal technology market is $548.44 million and is expected to grow by 17% over the next 5 years to reach approximately $2.6 billion.

In its 2025 report titled "The Future of Legal," Gartner found that 74% of the most efficient legal departments have implemented legal transformation plans. As a result, according to the Gartner report, 79% of the most efficient companies increased their guidance and management development rates. In contrast, only 38% of the least efficient businesses have planned transformation, and 43% of these businesses have had to struggle to adapt to changing conditions and make risk-balanced decisions.

According to the report prepared by Lexis Nexis for 2025, the proliferation of Generative AI is beginning to redefine the legal sector. According to this report, AI is no longer an ordinary "toy" but has become a critical part of competition.

WHY ARE LAWYERS HESITANT ABOUT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?

The practitioners of law, which has always stood out as a traditional and conservative field, are today watching developing technology from a step back. This situation is felt even more in the field of artificial intelligence and Legal Tech. The underlying reasons are that artificial intelligence is first and foremost a very new field, and with artificial intelligence entering the field of law, some limitations and risks have emerged.

As we will discuss in detail in a later article, at the forefront of these concerns are the accuracy (hallucination) problem experienced by some artificial intelligence programs, concerns based on attorney-client confidentiality, artificial intelligence's bias problems, ethical and responsibility issues, and lack of legal regulation.

The rigid and dogmatically organized structure of law and its change-resistant institutions make it difficult to adopt new technologies. Lawyers are hesitant about AI models that predict case outcomes, contract automation, and relatively new technologies such as digital case file management not being suitable for judicial processes and misleading them.

CONCLUSION

All things aside, the legal world, along with the entire world, has crossed the threshold of a great transformation and found itself in the midst of this change. The concept of Legal Tech has become indispensable to the legal world and has become an integral part of competition. Humanity has once again incorporated a technology beyond imagination into its life and made its entire life much more efficient, while at the same time continuing to approach this development with hesitation. One way or another, technology and artificial intelligence are developing every day, facilitating many tasks of lawyers and fundamentally changing the practice of legal professions. So, can artificial intelligence really take the jobs away from lawyers? Until we answer this in our next article, goodbye!