2022 is looking like another year where our team probably won’t see each other as much as we would like, so I thought it would be fun to ask our team to reflect on our recent past.

The majority of our team are engineers and data scientists who had not worked with legal technology prior to joining Syntheia, and so I wanted to ask them what they thought when they encountered Syntheia and legal technology for the first time.

During one of our chats, I asked the team for their thoughts.

(This is not one of the usual “start of the new year” blog posts where lawyers and legal technologists forecast what will happen in 2022… no, no. This is a blog post offering a light-hearted take on how "industry outsiders” perceive our slice of the technology landscape.)

Our Head of Data Science, Aly, was the first to reply.

Before learning about Syntheia, Aly thought that legal tech was “technology that could save a lot of hours for highly paid lawyers”. He didn’t know what lawyers would do with the time they saved, “maybe make more money?”

I thought that was a surprisingly capitalist answer for a self-professed dataphile.

Our security engineer, Moataz, offered a much flatter take on legal tech. “Process automation technology is the only thing that comes to mind,” he replied. Our fullstack engineer, Maged, agreed, “it is all just process automation technology.”

In other words, I think they thought legal technology is boring. It is a slice of the software industry that has not been perceived as either fast paced or exciting

Our frontend developer, Attia, brought back a little bit of the commercial flavor. “Legal technology automates tasks for lawyers so there is little to no human interactions,” and then he added, “so they can make money doing that.” He backed up his view with a story from one of his friends who runs a tax returns filing company in the US, where they automate the questionnaire and filing process, charging hundreds of dollars for each tax return. Like Attia, our fullstack developer, Wang, also gave an example where “it is technology to invoice clients and track cases for lawyers.”

Our algorithms engineer, Yousef, gave the broadest answer, that the legal technology was “anything to do with lawyers and what they have to do.”

Upon reflection, their answers were perhaps unsurprising.

Prior to working with us, our engineers did not know much about legal technologies, primarily because they did not know much about what lawyers do.

I guess it would be similar if someone asked me as a lawyer about “agritech”. Since I can barely distinguish between potatoes and yams, and certainly do not know the intricacies of agriculture or understand the all the pressures and the needs of farmers, I would give far more superficial and shallower responses.

I am happy to report that all of the engineers added to our conversation, with an unsubtle wink, “but we know much more about legal technology now.”

I love the fresh perspectives our engineers bring to our work, and the parallels experiences they inject into the software we are creating.

“Can you send me written responses later?” I asked them.

“Sure,” they replied.

I am still waiting a month later…