The modern world increasingly integrates information and communication technologies into more and more digital services. This involves the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and its algorithms with, necessarily, a transfer of data between various stakeholders, whether through networks or devices.

Herbert Simon noted that it is the duty of people who study a new technology to offer their interpretations regarding its likely effects on society.1

Digitalization and the development of automated systems, as well as the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), have radically changed the legal landscape and will continue to impact law at an accelerated pace. These developments have led to the creation of a new industry, legal tech (LT), which aims at creating technological applications specifically tailored for law and the legal market. LT includes a broad range of applications: some of the most prominent and recurrent examples include automation in the drafting of contracts, “mining” case-law, or the creation of smart dispute resolution systems not requiring human intervention. As a result, operations that were previously unthinkable, or that would demand an enormous amount of human resources, can now be readily done through numerous legal services available to lawyers, other professionals, and consumers.1 The rise of LT has brought about various responses, from those who advocate the innovating potential of LT2 to legal traditionalists that consider the replacement of human resources by technology to be highly disruptive.3 In addition, there are those who advocate for a level-headed distinction between “hype” and reality.4 Nonetheless, it would be shortsighted not to see that the advancement of LT is going to have a profound impact on the legal sector, in a degree similar to that which industrialization had on manufacturing.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplet’s: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

In its 2020 survey, the Edelman Trust Barometer identified a paradox: ‘despite a strong global economy and near full employment, none of the four societal institutions that the study measures – government, business, NGOs and media – is trusted’.1 This is a rather grim sounding paradox. One can try to resolve it in a variety of ways. An obvious way would be to argue that when we measure trust, we are measuring a rather uninformative quantity. After all, trust can be considered good and a loss of trust would accordingly be bad only if and insofar as trust is placed in something or someone actually worthy of our trust. So, the true problem, one could argue, is not the loss of trust but the loss of trustworthiness – and this has not been measured.2 Whether trust is a good proxy for trustworthiness has yet to be established.

In the blossoming field of legal tech (LT)1 the majority of attention goes to the work of judges and advocates in the areas of dispute resolution, due diligence, and contract assessment.2 Far less consideration is given to what LT might contribute to consumer relations for businesses, which is also referred to as B2C relations.3 In this contribution, I would like to focus precisely on this area, as there are already developments underway that are legally relevant and may require legal intervention.

New technologies are promising a new world. It has now become apparent that blockchain technology will have many more future uses than simply supporting cryptocurrencies and other cryptoassets.1 Blockchain could support many new applications with a potentially disruptive impact on social life such as smart contracts, managing registers of assets, and the operation of autonomous agents. In addition, some governments intend to base essential government operations, such as land registries, on blockchain.2 This may potentially lead to the law being of diminishing importance in the world.3

Any discussion of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) necessarily relies on some basic, shared notions, allowing us to identify those procedures that are considered an alternative to litigation in national courts. When legal scholars refer to arbitration or mediation, for instance, they often take it for granted that those linguistic labels are sufficient to designate a certain procedure. To be sure, none of these labels have a monolithic quality: the word ‘arbitration’, for instance, designates a family of private adjudication phenomena, which can differ in significant ways. Each ADR mechanism, hence, is best understood as a spectrum of procedures. Nevertheless, all of the instances falling within that spectrum must necessarily have some shared broad-stroke feature, so that they can all (with an unavoidable degree of simplification) be referred to as arbitration, mediation or another ADR mechanism. In other words, there must necessarily be some boundaries that lawyers heuristically deploy to build a rough yet shared taxonomy of ADR.

As the practice of law is heavily impacted by recent and ongoing advances in technology, it is difficult to provide an accurate picture of either the status quo or the future of the profession whilst focusing on details. Therefore, this chapter focuses on general principles as well as underlying developments and mechanics, rather than detailed accounts of which legal department, agency or law firm is using which techniques or technologies.

The potential of digital solutions and legal tech (LT) for increasing access to justice is real. Although many LT developments focus on innovation of law practices, in several countries we see LT as champion of access to justice. These typically are new types of players in the market that provide legal services directly to the public. Even though practice-based evidence shows their positive impact, legal services regulations struggle to catch up and facilitate these developments. They, as a matter of fact, may actually hamper access to justice improvements. In that respect, it is illustrative that private investors acknowledge the potential of LT, but only dared to invest 2.8 per cent of their $1 billion total investments in 2018 in customer-facing services.1