A flurry of dynamic health challenges, technological advances, and environmental changes is breathing new life into several fast-growing legal practice areas. We explore these legal practice areas to uncover their growth factors and how your law firm can be an excellent fit to serve these high-growth areas.
Changes in Health
The pandemic spurred an explosive change in the health industry. Over-crowded hospitals and the rise of infectious diseases has prompted hospitals to relook at their processes for better quality patient care, better access to care, and patient protection. Subsequently, health law needed to evolve alongside these changes to ensure the operation and delivery of better healthcare services.
Health law practitioners fight for the best possible patient treatment, improved access to care, lower healthcare costs, and patient protection when acquiring insurance and other forms of coverage. These safeguards patients as they seek legal counsel to obtain high-quality medical care.
Besides that, another emerging health-related legal practice area is cannabis law. As countries move towards legislating the use of cannabis in a medical capacity, lawyers will need to step up concurrently with this area of law, with a deep understanding of policy timelines. This legal practice area will serve more patients, hospitals, financial institutions, and cannabis businesses over time.
Advancements in Technology
The need for technology-related laws to keep people safe will only increase as technology develops. Notable advancements in intelligent technology, drones, privacy, cyber security, and NFT IP have created a massive demand for legal expertise and lawyers to provide protection. These technology advancements frequently exceed the time needed to establish appropriate regulatory requirements.
Laws governing privacy and cybersecurity are complex and vary from country to country. A competent privacy and cybersecurity lawyer must know how various regulations, such as the GDPR (Europe) and HIPAA (US healthcare), may affect their clients. Lawyers in this area must constantly evaluate and review regulations. These lawyers reduce privacy and security risks and ensure that their clients comply with applicable laws. Clients in this legal practice area could range from startup companies to businesses of all sizes that collect sensitive information from their stakeholders.
Smart technology is becoming increasingly common in people’s homes and workplaces, including speakers, wearables, digital assistants, and smart appliances. These intelligent devices gather pictures, audio files, and recorded videos. Some lawyers may use the information in these intelligent objects as evidence in court or during mediation because it is stored there. When presenting this evidence in court, attorneys can reference current technology like security cameras. However, developing knowledge and the integrity of the data gathered by these new forms of intelligent technology is always important.
As drones are made accessible to anyone, from hobbyists to professional videographers, performers, and even the military, it opens up a very complex field of law because drone usage intersects with laws governing intellectual property, public safety, and privacy. Specific regulations are established, such as the need for drone registration and the operator always having a clear line of sight with the drones. However, lawyers need to be updated in this legal practice area, as drone laws are continually updated and vary from country to country.
The usage of the blockchain has evolved and brought about an artist’s heaven with the invention of NFTs or non-fungible tokens. Artists and creators use NFTs to sell their work just as investors use NFTs as an instrument for financial investment. In this legal practice area, lawyers need to understand that NFTs are a unit of data used to track data ownership and transactions. Traditionally, when a copyright owner sells their intellectual property to another party, they do not share in the increasing value of that asset. With NFTs, however, particular tools enable the original owner to continue to profit when the intellectual property is resold. There are no rules governing NFTs at the moment. However, lawyers need to understand better how NFTs are sold, purchased, and transferred because they conflict with present IP regulations with ownership, in particular, being fluid.
Challenges in Environmental Law
The critical need for environmental conservation and sustainable development has been brought to light by climate change. Environmental lawyers will be more necessary as the world works to prevent and lessen the effects of global warming.
Sustainability, air and water quality, hazardous wastes, agriculture, and biodiversity are all covered under environmental legislation. Lawyers must serve in various roles in this developing field of law, including advisers, compliance consultants, policy analysts, risk assessors, and court plaintiffs.
In a nutshell
The legal profession constantly evolves alongside social, political, technical, and environmental changes. To stay relevant, lawyers and law firms need to understand the fundamentals and stay updated with changing regulations. Lawyers should continue their education by attending law conferences, industry reporting, ABA resources, and networking. The three practice areas we discussed will keep expanding and branching out.
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