How do lawyers engineer and develop legaltech projects? A story of opportunities, platforms, creative rationalities, and strategies

Over the last fifteen years, the working context of lawyers has undergone many changes. Evolving in an increasingly competitive, deregulated and globalised market, they are subject to higher tax pressure while being exposed to unbridled technological innovation. Indeed, a growing number of entrepreneurs are using digital solutions to provide online legal services that are supposed to be faster and cheaper. If many of them are non-lawyer legal entrepreneurs, many lawyers are also engineering innovative projects and launching their own start-up companies, known as “LegalTech” or “LawTech”. However, few studies – none to our limited knowledge – provide an empirically-grounded analysis of such projects, leaving some questions unanswered. Who are these entrepreneurial lawyers? How and why do they engineer and develop legaltech projects? And how do they challenge the legal profession? To answer these questions, this article draws on a qualitative study of three contrasted start-ups that have recently been developed by some Belgian lawyers. The research methodology combines grey and scientific literature reviews, web-documents (“Manifestos”, hereafter) analysis, and semi-directive interviews lead with the start-up’s founders (n = 5), the Bar association’s representatives (n = 3), and some members of the main Belgian legal tech network (n = 4).