Practice Management

A project to create the first online dispute resolution system for divorcing and separating couples in the UK has been put on hold, Legal Futures has been told. Relate, the country’s largest provider of relationship support, received no government funding for the project, and instead relied on private backers, including Google.

Ulster University launched the UK’s first legal innovation centre last night, bringing together its law school, school of computing and intelligent systems, and global law firms Allen & Overy and Baker McKenzie. It aims to operate at the intersection between legal process innovation, technology and access to justice.

A highly experienced solicitor who breached the Money Laundering Regulations 2007 in a property transaction that led to a £500,000 fraud did not act dishonestly, the High Court has ruled. As a result, it dismissed a subrogated claim brought by the insurers of London law firm Pemberton Greenish to make her cover what they had to pay out.

Two law firms have found themselves ‘named and shamed’ in the government’s latest list of businesses that failed to pay workers the national minimum wage – although for one of them it amounted to an underpayment of 50p a week.

A service that aims to use artificial intelligence to make legal contracts readily understandable by consumers is the latest of our lawtech start-up profiles. We investigate six-month-old Nift, which is already employed by some big-name companies.

Defendants will soon be able to plead guilty, be convicted and pay a penalty immediately and entirely online for certain offences, the Ministry of Justice announced yesterday as digital justice moved a step closer to reality.

A global law firm is deploying robotic process automation software in its high-volume legal practices, in some cases reducing the time taken to complete tasks from 35 minutes to just four minutes. But it told Legal Futures that its aim was to improve efficiency, not replace people.

The director of a lead generation company that was fined £200,000 for sending out thousands of spam text messages over personal injury, PPI and other claims, has now been disqualified as a director for six years for showing “disregard for the law”.

A group of volunteer lawyers and software developers worked over last weekend to create a new app to help travellers impacted by the Trump administration’s ‘immigration ban’, in what has been described as a “fantastic example of rapid prototyping and iterative design”.

Baker McKenzie, the world’s second biggest law firm, has announced plans to introduce due diligence software based on machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, as part of an innovation drive that looks to import ‘design thinking’ into how it delivers legal services.