"I never think of the future, it comes soon enough." This is one of the hundreds of quotes attributed to Albert Einstein. Whether or not Einstein actually said this, here at Counselect we have our own adaptation: "We always think of the future, and it comes soon enough."
To capture this spirit of 'apna time aa gaya' (our time has come), our content team asked our leaders to stick their necks out and predict the trends in legal innovation that could make headlines this year. It didn't take much convincing really, except the effort to pull them away from the end-of-year celebrations for a bit (notice the Christmas baubles and Santa-red sweaters!)
Dive in.
Ritvik Lukose feels that AI will no longer be restricted to innovation labs. We'll see fee-earners deploying it in the course of routine work. He supports his point with a striking analogy—the mainstreaming of AI will allow practice-oriented lawyers to see more of the forest (by processing large datasets) as opposed to being stuck with a view of trees (a single contract or case file).
Balanand Menon holds forth on his obsession: the rise of the Global Legal Capability Centre. In under four minutes, he delivers a capsule history of legal outsourcing over the last couple of decades and the shift to insourced legal teams. He predicts that at least 20 percent of all Global Capability Centres in India will have a dedicated Legal and Compliance team in 2025 (up from <10 percent currently).
Rishabh Chopra doesn't hold back when he says that it's "no longer only about balancing the budget and balance sheets" for the CFO, it's going to be about "reshaping the future." And that's because the strategic CFO will be expected to function as the link between Finance and Legal on three crucial axes: data, tech and innovation.
Emerald Amara talks about the increasing importance of the 'T-shaped' lawyer—the kind of lawyer who has specific expertise but also a broader understanding of business strategy and technology. Demand for the business-oriented lawyer has been hotting up in the past couple of years, and 2025 is the year that the space could explode.
Vaishali Gopal brings her many years of experience in legal operations to bear while foreseeing that there won't be any legal service delivery without Legal Ops. We're not going to forget her analogy in a hurry. Legal Ops is like the WiFi in your home, Vaishali says, you don't notice it when it's working. But when it's not, it's chaos!
There you have it. Our top 5 predictions for the legal innovation space in 2025. Whether you agree, disagree or have something to share, we'd love to hear from you.
Originally published Jan 22, 2025
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