Practice Management

A new online service for family and immigration clients is launching today, giving them access to lawyers at prestige firms such as Withers and Farrer & Co. The founder said she wanted the website to help “thousands of people” reduce their legal costs in a “very substantial way”. Users can buy answers to legal questions for between £4.99 and £200.

A senior barrister has explained why she took to Twitter to shatter a longstanding “taboo” by discussing the emotional impact on advocates of “rude” or “abrasive” judges. She said it was time “for someone to put their head over the parapet and talk about the things that upset us and acknowledge that these things hurt”.

Leading legal artificial intelligence company ROSS Intelligence has unveiled a new $8.7m (£6.6m) funding round, some of its from Nextlaw Labs, the business accelerator backed by UK-based global firm Dentons. ROSS has developed AI technology that can read and answer questions about the law.

The big commercial law firms are not delivering value for money and often fail to stick to budgets, a survey of over 800 corporate clients has found – though some are much worse than others. In all, clients said their solicitors only met or exceeded their expectations on value for money in 49% of cases – DAC Beachcroft was top with 66%.

Work is underway to create a charter that would signal to junior solicitors that a firm is a “great employer”, it emerged yesterday. The charter would include a commitment to pay the recommended minimum salary for trainees and a commitment to the wellbeing of staff.

The Bar Council has closed its flagship nursery scheme at Smithfield in the City of London, citing a lack of places and promising to find other, “more effective” ways of supporting barristers with childcare responsibilities. The Bar Nursery – five years in the making – was launched to some fanfare in April 2013.

An internet conveyancing platform last week completed what it claimed was the first property to be digitally exchanged online and moved instantly to a live blockchain. It reported the property – in Trowbridge, Wiltshire – went from initial marketing to a verified online exchange in just seven days.

More than 50 solicitors, barristers and in-house counsel have volunteered to outsmart predictive software based on artificial intelligence in a ground-breaking lawyer v machine challenge. Lawyers will have a week to predict whether real PPI complaints were upheld or rejected by the Financial Ombudsman, before CaseCrunch has its go.

A European legal services provider specialising in advising tech companies has launched a prototype of what it calls the first business-to-business legal chatbot and, continuing its rapid expansion, plans to open a London office at the end of the year.

A London and Cape Town-based law tech start-up that provides companies with tailored regulatory compliance advice, has raised just over $1m (£740,000) in a seed funding round that included investment from the global law firm Dentons’ business accelerator, Nextlaw Labs.

Many LGBT+ barristers believe the Inns of Court are not doing enough to combat homophobia at the Bar, according to a ground-breaking study which suggested that “homophobia is stronger at the Bar than in the general population”.

The market for blockchain-backed ‘smart contracts’ should grow quickly, according to a partner at a global law firm, who is already working with the emerging technology. Lee Bacon, a partner at Clyde & Co, made the prediction as his firm launched a consultancy aimed at advising insurers and other clients on them.

SME law firms are investing their marketing budgets in old-style strategies they know are often ineffective, rather than explore new technologies that are already taking hold in other sectors, according to research being launched at today’s PI Futures conference in Liverpool.

HM Courts and Tribunals Service is to start hosting digital family court bundles centrally next year as part of its project to digitise the courts, it has emerged in a briefing sent to family judges. Moving from manual paper bundles to digital bundles in the family courts is widely seen as the best way to eliminate errors and reduce costs.

A leading north-west law firm has been ordered to pay £68,000 in VAT for electronic local authority property searches it procured from an agency, after a tribunal ruled that they should not have been treated as disbursements. The case, in which the Law Society unsuccessfully intervened, could have significant repercussions for many conveyancing firms.