Practice Management

“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”.

Company directors should consider the risks of using artificial intelligence technology so as to understand and manage their liability, according to a report by magic circle law firm Slaughter & May. AI was “the most transformative technology” of this century, it said. However, risks included AI being maliciously ‘re-purposed’.

LawBot, a legal advice chatbot created by four Cambridge University law students, is to relaunch next month in seven countries with the aim of becoming a commercial operation funded by issuing its own cryptocurrency. The new version analyses the quality of users’ claims, moving from decision-tree reasoning to data-driven intelligence.

Nextlaw Labs – the tech venture launched by global law firm Dentons – has joined with London lawtech community Legal Geek to tour European capitals in search of the best legal technology. So far, a team of lawyers and technologists has visited Amsterdam and Berlin, and will visit Brussels this week and Paris next week, before returning to London’s Canary Wharf.

Many law schools are teaching law “as it was in the 1970s”, Professor Richard Susskind, IT adviser to the Lord Chancellor, has said. Professor Susskind said there was “little regard” for technology or artificial intelligence, leaving law graduates “not just ill-prepared for legal work as it is today, but very ill-prepared for how it will be tomorrow”.