Over the past 20 years, nearly all aspects of our financial lives have migrated online, from tax returns to banking. Yet arguably the most important and protracted financial process in our lives has remained doggedly devoted to the paper based world. A single signature in Rotherhithe, south-east London, on 4 April, however, may have just lit the touch paper for transforming this process. By signing the UK’s first ever digital mortgage through the government’s new “sign your mortgage deed” service, a signal was sent that the home-buying process is finally on course to be digitised, simplified and streamlined.

Solicitors, and their insurers, dealing with property transactions should look closely at their due diligence procedures following last week’s landmark ruling on liabilities from the Court of Appeal. It is clearly good news for buyers who are victims of identity fraud. Dreamvar UK Ltd v Mishcon de Reya & Mary Monson Solicitors also has implications for anyone holding monies in a client account for a transaction. The ruling is likely to lead to increased professional indemnity insurance premiums for solicitors engaged in property transactions. They should review the terms and conditions of their retainers in light of this ruling.

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.