My admittedly undocumented assumption is that the legal profession is less exposed to such demands than many other industries. This is likely due to a combination of factors: clients often have limited insight into how legal services are actually produced, and the legal profession has traditionally maintained a certain distance from its clients—successfully positioning itself as something unique and operating on a pedestal of its own.
There is also a structural challenge that I increasingly doubt we will ever fully overcome: the legal industry's rather peculiar and market-detached focus on time spent, accompanied by a limited focus on value creation. This is not only true for lawyers themselves but also for clients, including highly sophisticated ones.
My view is that we should be transparent about how legal services are produced and open to clients imposing requirements regarding the use of efficient and secure tools. However, such transparency depends on our ability to articulate the value of our services rather than simply how long they took to produce. Today, there are tools that not only improve quality but are also significantly more time-efficient. If the market effectively penalises firms for becoming more efficient, there will naturally be little incentive to invest in efficiency gains.
And it should be in everyone's interest to embrace the remarkable tools available for improving efficiency. I am not only referring to AI but to a broad range of digital solutions. Let me offer a few basic examples:
Many traditional legal tasks, particularly litigation, require extensive legal research. Research is almost tailor-made for large language models (LLMs), and there are now many excellent tools available. At CO:PLAY, for example, we use Pandektes, which has almost entirely eliminated our reliance on more traditional—and considerably more expensive—legal research platforms. The results for our clients are better, and we spend less time (and money) achieving them.
In principle, LLMs can take you surprisingly far when drafting contracts (our clients certainly prove that every day), but there is still a considerable gap to closing the final—and important—20 per cent. We therefore combine traditional template libraries with a highly effective Australian solution called Smarter Drafter. These initiatives have significantly improved efficiency within our corporate team, allowing standardised work to be delivered faster and at a lower cost.
Court proceedings remain highly document-intensive. Although the Danish courts have digitised civil proceedings, they often use these digital tools only to a limited extent. For example, some courts still require physical copies of document bundles that are already only a few clicks away on their screens.
Document bundles, authorities bundles, and hearing bundles can all be produced more efficiently. CO:PLAY uses Visiodocs to prepare these often substantial document collections quickly and accurately. Visiodocs is also highly effective when handling large volumes of PDF files, which are commonplace in litigation. From a client's perspective, paying significant amounts of money for these administrative tasks creates very little value.
Law firms generally employ more administrative staff than most other professional services businesses. While the number of secretaries has declined over time (as lawyers have gradually learned to use computers themselves), many processes—including matter opening, KYC and AML procedures, time recording, and billing—still involve substantial administrative resources.
There is enormous potential both in deploying efficient practice management systems, such as Legis365, and—perhaps more challenging—encouraging lawyers to use them effectively.
Fortunately, there are many excellent document management systems capable of version control, storage, search, and access management. Nobody singled out, nobody forgotten. The Microsoft Office suite itself is virtually limitless in what it can do.
The challenge lies in enabling lawyers to use these increasingly sophisticated tools effectively and avoiding a return to paper-based case files, with all the inefficiencies, security risks, and lack of flexibility that follow. At CO:PLAY, we have operated as a paperless firm for more than a decade, and that has helped create a fundamentally digital culture that we hope our clients can feel in their interactions with us.
These basic digital solutions represent low-hanging fruit. They can deliver substantial benefits while also helping to drive what is, in my opinion, a much-needed shift in lawyers' attitudes toward digital tools.
Beyond these foundational technologies, we are now seeing a continuous stream of new products, particularly AI-focused solutions. AI tools are increasingly being integrated into everyday applications to the point where they are becoming easy to use even for less digitally inclined professionals, without requiring sophisticated prompting skills.
In other words, there are no longer any excuses for not getting on board the digitalisation train.
For our clients, the answer to the question of whether they should demand that their law firms use modern digital tools should be a resounding:
Yes.