**2. Background: Legaltech or Lawtech**

The transformation that the legal industry is suffering with the introduction of technology is driving the emergence of these new concepts. Since the emergence of Legaltech in 2017, the concept has continued to grow in popularity and variety, and it is when new versions of it have begun to emerge. For example, in the U.S. and U.K., the term Lawtech is also appearing. In fact, for The Law Society of England and Wales there is only Lawtech, not Legaltech. The Law Society of England is the professional body representing solicitors in England and Wales. For example, there are those who understand Legaltech as solutions for lawyers who do their work cheaper and efficient (Bues and Matthaei 2017), while Lawtech would be legal self-services for small companies and without the need for lawyers.

In line with the above, there are those who propose the differentiation of how Legaltech implies the digital transformation of the legal profession, emphasizing the idea of Legaltech as tools for lawyers (Navas 2019). Lawtech, on the other hand, is the concept of tools that replace lawyers, and also feature a high component of artificial intelligence and other computer science techniques.

Regarding the legal profession, lawyers skilled in technology, willing to adapt to the opening of new or specialized legal markets by technological changes, could also find lucrative market opportunities by pursuing low-level litigation that can be more easily and cheaply resolved through legal technology (Caserta and Madsen 2019).

For other researchers (Susskind 2008), Lawtech is a broader concept since Legaltech is associated with back-office technologies such as accounting systems, and less with new technologies such as artificial intelligence or expert systems related to lawyers, online courts, etc., which was the focus of the 1980s (Susskind 1986). Finally, they consider Legaltech to be more used and applied by the legal sector, while Lawtech would be more inclusive and open to technologists from any field (Susskind and Susskind 2015). However, this is not what the data obtained show, in fact the opposite is the case. Lawtech is the

term used to describe technologies that aim to support, supplement, or replace traditional methods for delivering legal services, or that improve the way the justice system operates (Webley et al. 2019). So, Lawtech covers a wide range of tools and processes, such as:


The Lawtech sector consists of law firms delivering legal services through technology, and the vendors that develop and supply technology solutions to those firms.

Other authors consider that Legaltech would be the appropriate term as it describes the activities of the legal sector, as does RegTech, the technology that helps to comply with regulation, for example helping to reduce the large amount of time and high costs that banks spend on regulatory compliance (Butler and O'Brien 2019), InsurTech as technologically-based insurance service (Gramegna and Giudici 2020), or FinTech as finance and technology to accelerate the digitalization of both the financial and insurance sectors (Rundo et al. 2019). Wealthtech can also be considered a subcategory of Fintech, given that its objective is to manage and grow people's financial wealth through technological advances (Chishti and Puschmann 2018). Therefore, all these sub-concepts can be understood to fall under the term Legal since we are talking about the legal industry, the legal market, and the legal sector, i.e., they are included in the broad concept of Legaltech.

Both concepts, Legaltech and Lawtech benefits legal services by:


Nowadays there are systems that can draft documents, conduct legal research, disclose documents in litigation, conduct due diligence, provide legal guidance, and resolve litigation online. Note that only in 2018, USD 1663 million has been invested in legal tech (Caserta 2020).

In summary of this section, it is noted that the two terms and their respective merits are not always clearly distinguished in the reviewed scientific literature.

## **3. Significance of Both Terms in the Scientific Literature: Results**

In this section the indexing of scientific articles with the terms Legaltech and Lawtech in the two major scientific databases, Scopus and Web of Science, will be briefly analyzed. Table 1 summarizes these terms according to the database consulted. It can be seen that both databases show a higher number of documents for Legaltech. To make a comparative view, a word cloud has been elaborated with all the keywords of both terms used in the scientific literature, obtaining Figure 1 for Lawtech and Figure 2 for Legaltech. In Figure 1, from the first place, the term human in Lawtech is remarkable, and analyzing the issue a more in depth, these documents focus on the impact of new technologies on the rights of individuals, such as the cyberhate (Blaya 2019), the impact of biotechnology as an example in reproductive medicine (Griffiths 2016), or Genetic Intervention and Bioethics (Conti 2017). Undoubtedly, the latter perspective is far from the object of this research.

**Table 1.** Legaltech and Lawtech del 2000 al 2020.


Figure 2, for Legaltech, shows the predominant terms used as techniques: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or Natural Language Processing Systems. As well, on the other hand, the target application is Legal Education or Law Students, Legal Profession,

Legal Services, Legal System, or Access to Justice. As an important and shared keyword related to both terms, the following is Laws and Legislation.

**"Legal " or "Legaltech" "Lawtech" or "Law Tech"**

**"Legal " or "Legaltech" "Lawtech" or "Law Tech"**

**Figure 2.** Cloudword of keywords in Legaltech.

In a more detailed analysis of these keywords in the two previous figures, Table 2 is obtained. In this Table 2 the top 10 keywords appearing in the cited documents are listed, in which the search terms (Legaltech and Lawtech) have been excluded.


From Table 2 it is remarkable that Legal education occupies the first position, this is due to the fact that a low number of documents makes collective works such as books, which are indexed by chapters, significantly increase the number of documents compared to the rest, e.g., the book "Modernizing Legal Education" (Denvir 2020). " "

**"legal " or "Legaltech" "Lawtech" or " "**
