Practice Management

Lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people around the world will be able to report incidents of persecution to international lawyers stealthily through everyday social media, after a hackathon backed by some of the largest UK law firms devised an app.

In the second of a series of features profiling lawtech start-ups, we look at TripleCheck, a business which scans a company’s computers to check compliance with software licences. It has also helped the UK government with identifying malicious internet hackers.

Conveyancers should set up a project to plan the future of their industry and start with a “blank sheet of paper”, Professor Richard Susskind has said. Conveyancing would look “radically different” a decade from now, he argued, and it was a mistake to think that this would be achieved by “leisurely evolution”.

Personal injury claims that fall into an enlarged small claims track under government reforms should be dealt with online rather than in court, an expert Civil Justice Council group has suggested to the Ministry of Justice. It said that moving cases to the county court would be the “worst answer” to the many problems the idea could cause.

A leading north-west injury practice has received public money to back a link-up with academics that aims to develop ground-breaking artificial intelligence technology to support decision-making within the firm. It has formed a knowledge transfer partnership with Liverpool University.

Small businesses need a “beefed up” legal system that prevents disputes in the first place and resolves those that occur more, their representative body said today. This includes integrating the online court “seamlessly” with other courts, and a specialist commercial track in the small claims court.

E-mail hacks of conveyancing transactions are the most common cybercrime in the legal sector, with £7m of client losses reported in the last year, according to the Solicitors Regulation Authority. It said that three-quarters of cybercrimes reported to the SRA in the 12 months are some form of ‘Friday afternoon’ fraud.

The government yesterday began laying the ground for the online resolution of certain employment disputes, in the first sector-specific example of plans to transform the justice system. It also set out greater uses of case officers among other recommendations of Lord Justice Briggs that are being adopted.

The BBC has undermined a Law Society call to trial online convictions with cases of TV licensing evasion, after the broadcaster highlighted flaws in its argument. The society has recommended trying out online convictiosn in summary-only, non-imprisonable offences with TV licence evasion.

US legal technology giant LegalZoom has launched its first product since entering the UK market, a ‘digital will’ that it says will “revolutionise the way we think about and plan for our loved ones after our death”. The app enables users to make their will on their phone, and build a “digital scrapbook” to pass on along too.