It was probably inevitable that clinical negligence cases would become the next battle ground in the post LASPO world. After all, the amounts of money involved in compensating victims of negligence and their legal representatives are huge – £1.2bn in 2013/14. According to the National Health Service Litigation Authority, some £250m of this was paid out in legal costs, £175m of which going to claimant lawyers. So, surely the need to reform is self-evident? Or is it?

It is two years and one month since the coalition government decided not to raise the small claims limit for personal injury from £1,000 to £5,000. The then justice secretary, Chris Grayling, told Parliament in October 2013 that there were “good arguments” for increasing the limit “to raise incentives to challenge fraudulent or exaggerated insurance claims”.

Lawyers got something of a dressing down last week from Rocket Lawyer boss Mark Edwards. Mr Edwards said lawyers were not “great innovators” and not much would change while most firms were run entirely by lawyers. He was speaking in a small, cramped room in a basement of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills – possibly reflecting the BIS view of legal services, but hopefully not.

Having recently written a feature on the growing adoption of artificial intelligence-type (AI) technologies in the legal marketplace for Legal Futures Insight, I’ve been speaking to people in a number of different walks of life about how AI might affect all of us. Curiously, a common response from skilled professionals is along the lines of a defensive ‘what I do is specialised and relies heavily on exclusively human qualities’. Professor Richard Susskind and his son, Oxford economics lecturer Daniel, in their book, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, note similarly that professionals see the advantages of AI in every field but their own.

The first, and most important, thing to remind everyone before I dissect the events of the last few weeks is that there is still no stain on the character of former Chief Legal Ombudsman Adam Sampson. There has never been any suggestion of fraud or wrongdoing around the expenses issue which led him to resign, and the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice, Richard Heaton, acknowledged before the justice select committee last month that, in the private sector, the arrangements would have passed muster.