Practice Management

Applications were up in the latest round of an accelerator programme for lawtech start-ups run by a London law firm, with smart contracts among technologies of particular interest, it has emerged. Six companies will win through to work with Mishcon de Reya from the “concept through to revenue-generating stage”.

An online legal advice website has created an artificial intelligence-backed robot that it claims has been trained to answer questions on consumer rights law in natural language using one of the world’s largest datasets.

Only 11% of small businesses consider solicitors to be good value for money, and most choose not to use them when faced by a legal problem, seeing them as a last resort, according to major new research. It also found that the annual cost of small businesses’ legal problems to the UK economy to be roughly £40bn.

National insurance law firm BLM has teamed up with three professors from the London School of Economics in a two-year research project to create models that predict the cost, length and outcome of litigation. AI will be an “important part” of the partnership, but it aims to bled technology with actuarial knowledge and ‘decision science’.

Law firms have taken advantage of a soft insurance market to secure 18-month professional indemnity insurance deals at a “very good” rate, a report has found. More firms were asking about additional cover to protect solicitors against defence costs in disciplinary proceedings, in the wake of the Leigh Day case.

The English lawyer behind a bid to provide legal backing to deals involving both the virtual world of blockchain and real world commerce, has forecast that in a decade most global trade will be governed by arbitration agreements coupled with smart contracts.

An accounts clerk at a west London law firm who faced false allegations of sexually harassing a fellow employee – who was the daughter of the owner – has won his claim of unfair constructive dismissal. After winning his claim first time around, he won it again on a reconsideration of the question of whether he had affirmed the firm’s breaches.

A City law firm partner who had to pay £215,000 to settle his debt to the bank of his former firm, which had gone bust, was not able to deduct it from his earnings at his new firm for tax purposes, the Court of Appeal has ruled.

A new breed of specialist artificial intelligence (AI) lawyer will emerge within 20 years, but governments should only legislate on the subject once technology companies have had time to develop their own ethical principles, according to Microsoft. By that time, virtually all lawyers will rely on AI to assist them with their practice, it said.

The time for just talking about new ways of doing things in the law is over as clients “turn their backs on the pricing and delivery models that law firms have traditionally sold them”, a leading banker has warned. He said a “palpable shift” in thinking and serious investment in new technologies and delivery methods were now strategic priorities.