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Acceptance of legal technologies among legal professionals

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Acceptance of legal technologies among legal professionals

This thesis examined the acceptance of legal technologies in the legal services industry. The legal services industry has been traditionally perceived as conservative in its business models and resistant to change. There is, however, a growing interest in utilizing innovative legal technologies in the legal services business. This research addressed a recognized research gap on the technology acceptance by legal professionals in the business-to-business legal service sector in Finland. The theoretical part first explored the concept and definition of legal technologies highlighting a lack of consensus in the literature regarding their precise definition. This understanding was later confirmed in the empirical part of the study. The theoretical part further introduced the key theoretical models of technology acceptance and analyzed prior studies on the acceptance of legal technologies. The empirical part consisted of a qualitative case study, including interviews with legal professionals. The qualitative analysis of the interview data aimed at understanding the legal professionals’ perceptions on adoption of legal technologies. From the empirical study, 10 themes and 39 sub-themes were identified as factors proposed to affect legal technology acceptance by legal professionals. This study complements the existing research on acceptance of technologies with a set of proposed new acceptance factors gathered from context-rich interview data from a specific professional services perspective. For practitioners, this study provides valuable insights into factors to consider when integrating new legal technologies into legal service organizations.

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