By Denys Georgiou

The building blocks

A Cypriot law firm can buy the most sophisticated legal AI on the market and still struggle to make full use of it. That struggle need not last long. The infrastructure for legal technology in Cyprus is beginning to take shape.

There is a clear initiative under way: the National AI Strategy 2032 names legal services as one of five sectors where artificial intelligence should do the most for the economy. Cypriot lawyers, by necessity, do it all. They may represent a client in court, draft an agreement and advise on a transaction all on the same day. Legal technology that can research, analyse and draft will benefit them. But the infrastructure of the Cypriot legal sector is not yet ready to harness the full potential of AI. A move to the cloud, usable legal data and AI literacy are some of the steps the Cypriot legal market can take to build its foundation layer.

The files inside the firm

The first problem is closer to home (pun intended). Cypriot lawyers rely on documents that sit on local drives and local servers, and a good deal of that material is still on paper. No tool reaches information held that way, however capable it is. Files that are stored on local drives will not always benefit from the same analysis and automated workflows as those that are stored in the cloud.

The reasons for local storage are not unreasonable, which is why the position has held. Digitising decades of files is expensive, and nobody bills for it. Clients who have operated in Cyprus for decades and have never seen a problem with the way their data is stored will not always be reassured to hear that their file is moving to a data centre abroad. And the concern that does the most work is that a number of platforms host data outside the European Economic Area, which for a firm answerable under GDPR is a legitimate reason to say no.

If a firm does move its data to the cloud, new possibilities open up. A lawyer who has just joined can find what the firm already knows without interrupting a colleague who has been there longer. Security improves rather than worsens, because access becomes something that can be recorded and withdrawn, instead of something that depends on who holds a copy. And the firm’s own precedents – its most valuable asset, and the one most often lost when a partner retires – become searchable rather than remembered. The most important point, however, is that data held in the cloud can integrate with other platforms the firm may decide to use, so there is no need to duplicate documents each time a new system is added. The questions to put to any provider are where the data physically sits, who can reach it, and what happens to it if the firm ends the relationship.

The law outside the firm

The next requirement for an effective legal tech stack is access to up-to-date court decisions in a form that software can work with. Here, Cyprus is better served than most people assume. CyLaw has offered free access to Cypriot case law since 2002, funded by the Cyprus Bar Association and run on a non-profit basis. It carries real metadata, not just text, and allows decisions to be searched by citation. For a jurisdiction of this size, that is a genuine achievement. Lawyers are already using AI tools to search CyLaw and are getting useful results. But a tool searching from the outside can only ever work with what a public search box returns.

The next step should be an official interface, so that other software can query CyLaw directly. A connected system could then retrieve judgments in full rather than summarising a results page, trace every citation back to the official record, and bring relevant authority into a matter without a lawyer going to look for it.

The people who must use it

Larger firms in the UK and the US have innovation and knowledge management departments. Their goal is to scout the legal tech market and search for tools that would automate as many workflows as possible. They also compile templates for lawyers to use, and provide lawyers with training. In contrast, firms in Cyprus take a more hands-on approach in which lawyers are responsible for every step of the process. Each lawyer in Cyprus is therefore responsible for doing their own market research and learning how to use the tools themselves. It is also rare for a Cypriot lawyer to have repetitive tasks that can be automated: no two days are the same, and the work is largely bespoke. Nor can a colleague from another team be much help, because they do not see the work closely enough to know which parts of it could be done differently. Every lawyer is, in effect, their own innovation department.

One way to close that gap is for universities in Cyprus to introduce courses that give students hands-on experience with legal technology, and to encourage them to use AI ethically in their studies. As future practitioners, they need to understand the risks, limitations and considerations that come with using AI tools for legal research. The earlier they grow comfortable with these tools, the quicker they will be able to spot a hallucinated answer, to recognise where a model performs less reliably in Greek than in English, and to frame a prompt that produces what is actually needed.

Looking ahead

Law firms in Cyprus do not have an extensive legal tech stack, and they may not need one on the same scale that larger firms in other jurisdictions do. Much of the work here rests on client relationships, which AI is not going to replace. Even so, there is always an opportunity to make a process more efficient and to cut non-billable hours where possible. Legal technology can certainly help with that. AI is not going anywhere, and it will only improve. What matters is that we learn how it can serve us, and that we do so responsibly. To capitalise on it, we must first build the infrastructure. Migrating to cloud services hosted in the EEA, opening CyLaw to direct queries, and teaching students to work with AI responsibly from the start will give us the foundation a strong legal tech stack needs.