Financial services increasingly turns to legal technology, finds new report

Apperio and Morae Global Corporation team up to detail nine market drivers compelling legal tech adoption to manage growing volume of legal work.

London, UK – September 21, 2021 – Apperio and Morae Global Corporation announced today the publication of a joint report that examines the market drivers for legal technology adoption in financial services. The report, titled, “Why financial services are embracing legal tech” details the reasons compelling legal departments across private equity, investment banking and retail banking to evaluate, procure and implement legal tech.

“In-house legal teams in the financial services sector face competing pressures – like reducing costs even while the pace and volume of legal work climb,” said Apperio Founder and CEO Nicholas d’Adhemar. “In collaboration with Morae, we’ve analyzed these pressures to illustrate how legal departments in this market are adopting tech to support process innovation, optimize the legal function, and use data to achieve better legal outcomes.”

Collectively, Apperio and Morae have worked with hundreds of financial services companies. This new report leverages that combined experience and synthesizes it with several existing industry-leading studies to identify nine market drivers.

Those drivers are as follows:

• Risk created by market uncertainty
• Emerging competition from fintech to decentralized finance
• AUM growth leads to greater legal work volume
• Increased regulation and compliance requirements
• Perpetual internal cost pressure
• The drive for operational efficiency
• Rise of the legal operations function
• The environmental, social and governance (ESG) imperative, and
• Digital transformation.

Digital transformation is an exemplary market driver because financial services companies are often saddled with a patchwork of legacy tools, manual processes, offline records and outdated software. These tools are becoming increasingly expensive and risky to maintain, according to the report.

At the same time, technology investments have also become an opportunity cost that’s central to the traditional financial services business model. The prospect of missing out on investments has become a core argument for upgrading infrastructure in the process of converting to an all-digital environment.

“The volume of legal work will continue to grow, get more complicated, and do so amid an uncertain environment with growing cost and regulatory pressures,” said Sinéad Burke, a Managing Director with Morae Global Corporation. “This is due at least in part to ever-increasing data sources and volume. Legal can’t stop investigations, litigation, deal flow, or contract reviews in order to implement technology. But such teams must find a way to get ahead – ironically technology is a fundamental part of the solution to the challenge it presents.”

The full report is freely available for download here: Why financial services are embracing legal tech: Nine reasons for implementing modern tools to manage the growing volume of legal work in uncertain times.

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About Morae Global Corporation

Morae Global Corporation is trusted worldwide by leading law firms, legal departments, and compliance executives for the delivery of digital and business transformation solutions. Founded in 2015 by pioneers in the legal operations field, our vision is to execute legal + business strategies, resulting in lasting change, value and protection. Morae’s clients regularly refer us to their peers, our people stay with us, and our services keep clients ahead of what’s next. Morae offers the right people and technology needed by legal professionals across the globe, from our offices across four continents. Learn more at moraeglobal.com.

About Apperio

Apperio’s legal spend management software provides legal departments with real-time visibility to help control and optimise their external spend with law firms.  Data is gathered automatically, structured consistently and presented simply for analysis to help in-house teams make informed business decisions.

Apperio’s unique approach of connecting directly with law firms' practice management systems provides ongoing and historical data at the touch of a button. This provides complete cost certainty on both billed matters and work-in-progress legal fees.

Apperio helps in-house teams to stay in control of their legal spend and build trust with external counsel by offering a collaborative, rather than adversarial approach to legal spend management.

Currently, the platform is used daily by more than 50 in-house legal teams including Epiris, EQT, Network Rail, Royal London, Cornerstone and the UK’s FSCS.

Apperio is based in London, England. For more information, please visit Apperio.com or follow Apperio on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Media Contact:
Frank Strong
for Apperio, Ltd.
+1 202-352-5920
media@apperio.com