As a law firm, we're committed to a paradigm shift: incorporating technology and artificial intelligence not just to streamline our operations, but to deliver legal services that are more precise, agile, and strategic.
In this exercise of imagining what a modern law firm looks like, I realized something interesting: the work of a legal team is remarkably similar to that of a product development team at a tech startup.
What do I mean by this?
Just as product and technology teams design services, flows, functionalities, and customer journeys, we lawyers design legal frameworks, contracts, arguments, and legal narratives that guide and support a company's operations. In both cases, the goal is the same: to model reality through logical and functional systems.
One seeks to launch a competitive product; the other, to consolidate and provide certainty to operations.
A lawyer's code isn't written in Python or JavaScript, but in clauses, resolutions, and documents that represent possible scenarios within a regulatory framework.
Parallel Thinking Structures
The thinking structures between developers and lawyers are surprisingly similar. Legal thinking, at its core, is not so different from computational thinking. Both start from structured logic: defining conditions, anticipating scenarios, predicting outcomes.
A lawyer writes internal rules or contracts in the same way an engineer writes functions: with the intention that the system responds correctly to every possible situation.
Our outputs also have their technical equivalent. Sometimes we deliver a contract, an opinion, or a formal communication; other times, we file a submission with an authority. In all cases, what we produce is a structured response within a system of rules and timelines—a formal conversation between human systems.
The Inevitable Question
From so many similarities, an inevitable question arose:
Why not take developers' tools and apply them to legal practice?
From that question emerges SVA Development, our internal division focused on creating technological tools that merge legal practice with AI and software development.
From Laboratory to Practice
SVA Development was born as a laboratory, but has consolidated as a practice. For over a year, we've been building, testing, and refining internal applications that integrate legal logic with technological development, improving both our internal workflows and the quality of service we deliver.
At SVA, we're building a new way to practice, think about, and apply law.
We believe that thanks to available technology, there are more efficient ways to comply with legal frameworks and add more value to business reality.
Stay tuned to learn about our upcoming launches and discover how we're transforming legal practice through technology.