The recent hacking of phone and broadband provider TalkTalk has raised plenty of questions among lawyers about how safe the internet really is. Is our information, stored in distant silicon towers, really protected? Has the penny dropped on IT security? Shouldn’t we be more guarded in our acceptance of new technology and systems?

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.