Nerushka Bowan, Norton Rose Fulbright, believes lawyers need to upskill themselves to realise the benefits of technology. Photos: Karolina Komendera

If you’ve ever watched one of the many legal dramas out there – think Boston Legal, Suits and The Good Wife, to name a few – you’ll probably have witnessed a scene (or several) where the show’s hot-shot lawyer is struggling with a big case. Typically, he or she enlists the help of a lowly paralegal to sift through reams and reams of case law to find previous judicial decisions, called precedents, to support or further their argument. Then follow scenes of this lowly underling pouring over piles and piles of documents and books well into the night in a massive library in the hope of uncovering the single piece of information they need to win the case.

Norton Rose Fulbright still has a physical library, but it’s a lot smaller than it used to be, says Nerushka Bowan, a technology and privacy lawyer at Norton Rose Fulbright. “Nowadays, very few people actually go into the library because we’ve moved on from doing our legal research that way. We now have the information we need at our fingertips. If we’re looking for a specific case or a particular precedent, we can just go onto a digital system, type in a keyword and the information pops up.”