At the Product Innovation Competition during this year’s Legalweek (Jan. 28- 31), technologists will assemble to show off the next generation of data analytics, e-discovery and legal research tools. An awards presentation will be held on Thursday, Jan. 31 on the Legaltech LITE stage, presided over by a panel of four judges who are spending their holiday season trying to whittle a slew of applications down into a selection of six finalists.

Haley Altman, who’s moonlighting as a judge in addition to her day job as the founder and CEO of the project management platform Doxly, believes the competition has come along at critical time in the relationship between the legal and technology sectors.

“We’ve kind of been behind every other industry in terms of adopting technology or trying to find ways to fit it into our practice,” Altman said.

Some of that can be attributed to industry-specific hurdles inherent to the practice of law. Tech products that are developed with a broad marketplace in mind typically don’t take into consideration things like attorney-client privilege or confidentiality rules.

According to Altman, emerging companies are beginning to craft innovations with the legal sector in mind. The Product Innovation Competition could double as a showcase for firms looking to streamline or update their business models.

“By giving people a way to see what those new developments and enhancements are and how they might help with the overall delivery of legal services, I think that it’s so important to have this sort of a competition,” Altman said.

Judges will be evaluating applicants across several key categories, including design, functionality, applicability and whether or not there is a clear market need. The last one can be especially tricky to nail down.

In the past, people have pitched Altman business ideas that she thought were interesting—just not to a degree that would inspire the average consumer to open their wallet. Plus there are some problems that even the most advanced technology can’t solve.

“Just identifying that there’s a problem doesn’t mean that there’s something that’s going to solve it. Some things are just inherent to how we practice. It may not be efficient, it may not be great, but there’s just no way to change it,” Altman said.

Fellow judge Silvia Hodges Silverstein estimates she’s made it through at least a third of the submissions so far, a process that has to be balanced against her job as the executive director of the Buying Legal Council.

Silverstein has been involved in the buying side of legal services for over a decade and is familiar enough with the status quo that she’s looking for entries that have the potential to shake things up. Everybody claims to be unique, but some of the competitors have been better at articulating the “why” of it all than others.

“I’m definitely starting to have my favorites,” Silverstein said.

She thinks that innovations that draw upon AI learning to distinguish patterns and draw conclusions from linguistics will be especially impactful to the legal industry moving forward.

“I think that that will be something in our industry in particular where so much is based on language is going to be changing the market more than it already has in the last few years,” Silverstein said.