Practice Management

A six-month private test of the government’s new online probate service started last month, it has emerged as it looks to digitise the 280,000 applications received each year. As part of the project, HM Courts & Tribunals Service is working to better understand solicitors’ needs to reduce the number of applications that have to be returned.

A poll of almost 1,500 mortgage customers has highlighted familiar concerns about conveyancing – that it is slow, stressful and poor value for money. Conveyancers also came bottom when judged by how much they ‘made the deal happen’ compared to others in the process.

A hackathon has led to the creation by lawyers and technologies of a free mobile app aimed at helping the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy access support services and information. Legal Hackers Scotland, assisted by Glasgow tech firm Add Jam, put the app together in seven days following the hackathon.

No further public money should be spent on the Online Court until the performance of the newly-expanded online tribunal in British Columbia – which went live for small claims last month – has been assessed, according to veteran justice campaigner Professor Roger Smith.

“Quick and dirty” online dispute resolution (ODR) is better than “no justice or absurdly over-priced justice”, the president of the Supreme Court has said in a wide-ranging speech that included a devastating critique of legal aid policy over the past two decades.

Some 220 lawyers and technologists battled each other at a 24-hour hackathon over the weekend, overseen by the likes of the Lord Chief Justice and Professor Richard Susskind, to devise useful software tools that could support the forthcoming online courts. The winner used voice interaction and an online help assistant to assist litigants.

Almost half of the chief executives of lawtech start-ups in the UK are former lawyers, more than twice as many as from business and three times those from a software background, according to a report. However, a legal background was not essential to success, the report noted.

A personal injury law firm has lost a £4.5m claim against a legal expenses insurance underwriting agency that the expected number of referrals did not materialise. The firm failed to convince the High Court that there was a contractually binding oral promise in place from 2006 to 2011, when referral fees were lawful.

A 28-month pilot of the Online Court is to start next month, with HM Courts and Tribunal Service providing face-to-face assistance to the half of people signed up to it who are expected to need help with filling in forms. Meanwhile, the Master of the Rolls has suggested that physical hearings may become capable of live streaming, particularly in the Court of Appeal.

A ‘mystery shopping’ exercise to test law firms’ ability to communicate with customers has shown progress, yet the proportion of solicitors willing to follow up incoming calls from the public, although better than last year, was still “drastically low”.