Practice Management

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”.

The Solicitors Qualifying Exam could be postponed beyond its launch date of 2020, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has admitted. In a further development, the regulator has said it was possible that the all-powerful central assessor of the new exam could also be a course provider.

While the top end of recent law graduates are second only to business students in their earning power, the average wage law graduates receive does not stand out among other occupations, a massive government study has found. It highlighted too that an earnings gap between men and women entering the law opened up at the very start of their careers.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has dropped a new definition of ‘client money’ which would have excluded fees and disbursements in response to the concerns of practitioners, but is otherwise moving ahead with a huge rewrite of the accounts rules that reduces them from 41 pages to just seven, and approves the use of third-party managed accounts.

CrowdJustice, the online funding platform for public interest legal cases, has raised $2m (£1.5m) from an investment round to expand its presence in the United States. CrowdJustice’s founder and chief executive told Legal Futures that it was an important time to be in the US to help give voice to people “between elections”.

Insurance law firm BLM has set up a specialist data analytics team to help its lawyers make better predictions about their cases. Headed by a solicitor and a data scientist, it uses machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), to predict the length, cost and result of litigation.

Partners at a leading personal injury law firm have lost a professional negligence action against the accountants who recommended they sign up to two ultimately unsuccessful tax mitigation schemes. They succeeded at every stage of their claim only to fall at the last when the judge ruled that they brought the action out of time.

A ‘virtual’ chambers that supports direct access work has set up an alternative business structure, as has a niche financial services chambers, which become the second and third to be regulated by the Bar Standards Board. It licensed its first ABS, a collaboration between a London chambers and football agents, earlier this month.

Obelisk Support – the outsourcing business that uses former City solicitors to provide temporary support services to in-house teams and law firms – has hit the 1,000-lawyer mark. Set up in 2010, it has doubled in size in less than three years and founder Dana Denis-Smith said she hoped to do so again in the next two years.

Widespread change” is yet to happen at the Bar, with only a small minority of barristers planning to change the way they work or charge fees, a report for the Bar Standards Board has found. Despite the presence of “strong drivers for change”, the report said this did “not necessarily equate to a need or desire for a new approach”.

The High Court has struck out a negligence claim against London private client specialists Harcus Sinclair on the grounds that it was statute-barred. The judge said it could not be argued that a partner had deliberately concealed his conduct when it was “done in plain sight” of his client and other parties’ lawyers.

A law firm has lost more than £100,000 from a property transaction after falling for an e-mail scam, it has been reported. It comes as a conveyancer who had already been convicted of fraud and banned from working in law firms has been convicted again after defrauding three firms where she secured employment after changing her name.