Practice Management

A solicitor’s passing-off claim against her old firm for continuing to use her name as part of its branding has been thrown out by the court because the law firm owned the goodwill generated by her work. However, she did have a case to revoke the trade mark registered after the firm hired her to set up an employment practice.

Artificial intelligence will likely be better at predicting the outcome of cases than the most experienced QCs, the Lord Chief Justice has warned. He also flagged changes that would see unbundling, outsourcing, and lesser-qualified staff assisted by technology taking over some of the work now done by lawyers.

Law firm employees could be clamouring to take anti-money laundering training, if a business that has applied computer game technology to training in a subject not normally described as ‘fun’ successfully gains traction. In the latest of our features on lawtech start-ups, we profile a company using games as the model for designing training courses.

Plans by the Ministry of Justice to impose fixed-term contracts on fee- paid judges could be unlawful, the Bar Council has warned. The move has also been strongly attacked by the Law Society, which said solicitors could in future see judicial appointment as a gamble with their careers at their firms.

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.