After months of debate on the court modernisation programme led by Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service, we now have an authoritative analysis from the National Audit Office. HMCTS chief executive Susan Acland-Hood professed herself happy. The report was “helpful and constructive”. She was pleased that “the NAO acknowledges our ‘early progress’”. Her comments were more reflective of spin than the span of the NAO report. The NAO acknowledges the ambitious nature of the reform. But comments like “HMCTS’s change portfolio presents a very significant challenge” need minimal decoding to reveal a bit of concern.

Crispin Passmore, director of policy at the Solicitors Regulation Authority, writes: We are now nearing the end of a five-year programme to change how the SRA regulates so we can make sure we focus on what matters: high professional standards. Our reforms should help encourage new ways of working, but we also want to help lawyers and business work with us to implement innovations that might be difficult under existing regulations but are still in the public interest. Sometimes advice and guidance are enough, but through SRA Innovate we are also using waivers to existing rules to allow something new to happen safely.

There is no shortage of thought leadership on the topic of legal artificial intelligence (AI), whether in terms of defining the market segment, (re)educating audiences on what is possible with rapidly evolving technologies, and even the occasional ‘me-too’ displays of enthusiasm over new technologies and start-ups. We also find true thought leadership from legal tech visionaries, who describe the future of the legal industry and outline how legal roles are changing. What is clear is that tech companies are figuring out how to automate many day-to-day tasks using machine learning and AI.

There are a lot of changes happening in the personal injury sector right now, with many people wondering what the landscape will look like a year down the road. The relationship between law firms and claims management companies has never been without its challenges, and the Civil Liability Bill might make this even more complex. But how much is scaremongering, and what should solicitors be on the look out for?

“Our solicitors put lots of content on our website, but we don’t get much business from it”, the managing partner of a law firm said to me recently. Indeed, there was plenty of legal text on the website but there were several reasons why it was not yielding results. Of course, all lawyers can write, so it might seem logical to think that they can write content for a website. The question that you need to ask is, how well can they write? In particular, how well can they write for the internet?