Hello I am Javier de Cendra, dean of IE Law School and I want to welcome you all to this course on LegalTech and Entrepreneurship organized by IE Law School and under the direction of Martí Manent. Let me introduce you, Martí. Martí is a lawyer and he's also a serial entrepreneur in the intersection between law and technology. He's the founder and CEO of abogado.com and elderecho.com among other companies. He's also the director of one of our most exciting programs, the legal bridge to Silicon Valley. And he teaches both in the IE Business School and in IE Law School on law, technology, and entrepreneurship. Martí, it's a pleasure to have you here. Hi Javier. How are you? Very well, thanks a lot. So, shall we get this started? Yeah. Javier, why LegalTech? Well, that's a very good question. LegalTech is really the response I think to the disruption that technology is having across all sectors of the economy. And I would say that the legal sector is one of the most resistant to change, is one of the most conservative ones. So, that gives us a very good perspective to analyze what is coming. If we look to other sectors such as the financial sector, everyone is talking about FinTech and everyone now is thinking, "How is the financial sector going to look like two, three, five years from now? Who are going to be the giants? What kind of financial services are they going to provide?" And that's very interesting because the very large banks nowadays are not very sure anymore about who their competitors are. Against who are they going to compete? And what they know now is that it is relatively easy, on the basis of a human capital, human talent, to develop tech-based financial services that eliminate a lot of transaction costs, that are able to reach to new markets, to new consumers at a lower cost. And that gives an enormous competitive advantage. Now, I focus on FinTech but we could go to any other sector that has been transformed by the sharing economy, the collaborative economy, which is the outcome of globalization and technology. Now, if we look at the impact of globalization and technology in the legal sector, what we start to realize is that the changes that are going to take place are fundamental. I think. So, one can look just on the surface and think about how technology, technological solutions can help law firms to improve processes, to improve procedures, to be more efficient. And I would say that is the first layer of LegalTech but the changes go far beyond. If we, again, take the knowledge of the FinTech, we have to think, "Who are going to be the providers of legal services one, two, three years from now? Who are going to be the competitors?" Now, lawyers do a lot of things. One of them is to represent clients in court, but they also give advice. They also negotiate. They also arbitrate. Do we need traditional lawyers to do that? Probably not. Probably we can have many other companies which are tech-based companies. Which are formed by many professionals, among which engineers, that will be able to do those kind of tasks in a much faster, much cheaper, and therefore much more efficient way. So the industry is going to be transformed profoundly and these changes are going to happen everywhere in the world. Perhaps we will see differences among jurisdictions but it's going to happen everywhere. So LegalTech is really the effort to conceptualize a change, and to try to analyze what are the building blocks of that change, and to try to think how those changes will take place, in which time horizon, and what responses do we need to give as lawyers, as entrepreneurs, as academics, and so on and so forth. So I think it's an enormous fields with a lot of different angles to look at it. And it will really change the way we look at law and legal services very soon. Thank you for your opinion and now let's see how the course starts. Welcome. Hi. Welcome to this course, LegalTech and Startups. We are gonna explain how the digital revolution is affecting the legal sector. We are gonna explain how the startups are using the technology to disrupt the legal sector. My name is Martí Manent. I am a lawyer and also an entrepreneur. I have incorporated more than 10 companies. I've been working in the legal sector, I work at in Arthur Andersen legal and I'm gonna explain why technology and which technology is disrupting this sector. First, we need to think about the website, that was the revolution about decades ago. Next, the mobile phone, how the mobile phone is disrupting the legal sector. And third, the actual revolution -- the big data and machine learning and how that technology is affecting the legal sector. The legal sector is a classical business. We could talk about a classical law firm where the partner, an old guy, teach the junior who just entering the in the law firm. That is the classical old story from the last decades. Now, that has changed because the technology has put those new juniors on the top of the business. Also, the LegalTech market, the law firms market was a disconnected market. You could find a lot of law firms all around the cities and it was not a concentrate market. It was a disconnected business. The technology has changed all that way or to approach to that business. Who is making that change? As the course name, we are talking about the LegalTech and Startups and that disruption is made by startups -- small companies with an amazing entrepreneurs that are coming inside the legal sector and changing the rules. In the next video, I will explain how and which technology is affecting the legal sector and is disrupting the legal business.
