**1. Introduction**

The advance of information and communication technologies has led to changes in the way in which we relate to each other and to the administrations (Fang 2002). Law is no exception to these changes, its mandatory duty to modernize points to a new concept called Legaltech, which, despite its difficult conceptualization, has positioned itself as a relevant advance in the way in which law is conceived, through the inclusion of technological tools (Pasquale and Cockfield 2018). These days, legal technology such as software solutions for the delivery of legal services have become the key element in the current competition among the players in the legal market (Hongdao et al. 2019).

It should be noted that, although the concepts of Legaltech may seem recent, as early as 1873 Shepard developed a citation index following the codification that applied to federal trial judgments in the United States. This is even the background for the proposed importance of citations in bibliometrics and the impact of scientific papers (Garfield 1955). Another great example of how the legal services is a pioneer of bibliometrics is the Westlaw database, founded in the early 1970's and acquired by Thomson Corporation (now Thomson Reuters) in 1996. As is known, Thomson Reuters owns Web Of Science (WoS).

In the early 1970s, the US company Lexis Nexis was a pioneer provider of computerassisted legal research services. It introduced the world's first terminal with a telephone dialer that connected the very few law firms that could afford it to the law and jurisprudence databases of some U.S. libraries. Initially they offered full text search of Ohio and New York case law (Dale 2019). In the last 40 years, much progress has been made in legal technology, and the concept of technology applied to the supply or business of legal services has certainly become more popular from 2008 onwards (Mandel 2017).

In fact, the Legaltech landscape has grown so large and extensive that competing concepts such as Lawtech have emerged and the definition of what Legaltech does or does not mean has been widening or narrowing depending on the case and the context (Dubois 2020).

Legaltech is the acronym for Legal Technology, although at first it was used as legal tech (separate), it was undoubtedly the first way to talk about legal technology. In that sense, Legaltech is commonly understood to refer to the use of technology to provide legal services (Munisami 2019). That would be Legaltech, which could be defined as the use of technology in legal services to create:


The objective of this work is to analyze the two terms described, Legaltech and Lawtech in the main scientific databases, Scopus and WoS, to determine their possible differences if any, and on the other hand to determine which are the main lines of research in which scientific works related to this discipline are being developed. Note that the advantages and disadvantages of the technology's uses is not the focus of this study. It is about seeing how the concepts have arrived on the scientific agenda and how those concepts have taken shape.

The roadmap of this article has been, first, to review the background of both concepts in the scientific literature. Secondly, to see the relative importance of both terms in the two main scientific databases, Scopus and WoS. Thirdly, analyze the scientific fields and their temporal evolution in which the term Legaltech is being used, to try to identify the challenges and opportunities of research in this area.
