Legal Tech Lingo

Forget learning how to code or picking up the nuances of machine learning. Few (if any) legal folks need to learn all that technical stuff.

Instead, you will realize more benefits from the technology revolution by learning foundational concepts that will empower you to make smarter high-level tech decisions (like whether to get a new tool or invest more in the ones you currently use) and work with tech experts (who will be much better at creating and using the complex stuff). 

To get any of those benefits, one of the first steps is making sure you know enough of the lingo that talking about tech is easy. This week, let’s look at some of the most common tech lingo legal folks need to succeed. 

Variables

This refers to a setting in apps or other software that will vary depending on what information the user enters. For example, you might want to display one message if a client enters one year and another message if a client enters a different year. Perhaps the filing deadline is different depending on what sort of claim the client wants to pursue.

Logic Trees (or Workflow)

This refers to a series of actions that you have configured to be carried out in your app. The tree part refers to those pesky variables. Because you will want the app to do different things (and carry out a different series of tasks) depending on what information the user enters. 

Trigger

A trigger refers to some event or information that will cause another action to occur. So we might want to receive a notification whenever a certain person sends us an email. That person sending us the email would be the trigger that we would configure to cause another event (a notification) to happen.

Tech Stack/Stack

A stack is a sequence of tools or apps connected together (often using Zapier or native integrations). A typical stack will often include a front-end (for example, a website or some other way to display your app to your users), and a back-end (the tool that carries out your app’s operations).  

UI

This term refers to the user interface: What you see on the screen when you use an app or piece of software. UI is extremely important in legal, because UI that is hard to understand or figure out means that attorneys and professionals can’t easily use the tool on a daily basis. 

AI/Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are related concepts. AI refers to really advanced processing that mimics the complexity of human thought (but often goes even farther). Machine learning is the process by which AI tools can learn from large data sets to get smarter and extract insights. 

Analytics

This term refers to using a tool to gather insights from sets of data. For example, extracting insights from client data, billing data, or internal data so that you can do your legal work better. 

Document Automation

These tools help you automate portions of the document creation process. Often they use simple forms to collect information that needs to be inserted into a document (like a form or contract) and then the tool inserts that information into the document so that you don’t have to. 

Integrations

Integrating means that two tools (software, apps, and so on) can somehow share information with each other or otherwise work together. For example, if your email is integrated with your document management software, the two tools can share information so that you don’t have to manually enter information from one into the other. 

We will explore some more foundational tech lingo in future editions!