Practice Management

A solicitor’s passing-off claim against her old firm for continuing to use her name as part of its branding has been thrown out by the court because the law firm owned the goodwill generated by her work. However, she did have a case to revoke the trade mark registered after the firm hired her to set up an employment practice.

Artificial intelligence will likely be better at predicting the outcome of cases than the most experienced QCs, the Lord Chief Justice has warned. He also flagged changes that would see unbundling, outsourcing, and lesser-qualified staff assisted by technology taking over some of the work now done by lawyers.

Law firm employees could be clamouring to take anti-money laundering training, if a business that has applied computer game technology to training in a subject not normally described as ‘fun’ successfully gains traction. In the latest of our features on lawtech start-ups, we profile a company using games as the model for designing training courses.

Plans by the Ministry of Justice to impose fixed-term contracts on fee- paid judges could be unlawful, the Bar Council has warned. The move has also been strongly attacked by the Law Society, which said solicitors could in future see judicial appointment as a gamble with their careers at their firms.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people around the world will be able to report incidents of persecution to international lawyers stealthily through everyday social media, after a hackathon backed by some of the largest UK law firms devised an app.

In the second of a series of features profiling lawtech start-ups, we look at TripleCheck, a business which scans a company’s computers to check compliance with software licences. It has also helped the UK government with identifying malicious internet hackers.

Conveyancers should set up a project to plan the future of their industry and start with a “blank sheet of paper”, Professor Richard Susskind has said. Conveyancing would look “radically different” a decade from now, he argued, and it was a mistake to think that this would be achieved by “leisurely evolution”.

Personal injury claims that fall into an enlarged small claims track under government reforms should be dealt with online rather than in court, an expert Civil Justice Council group has suggested to the Ministry of Justice. It said that moving cases to the county court would be the “worst answer” to the many problems the idea could cause.

A leading north-west injury practice has received public money to back a link-up with academics that aims to develop ground-breaking artificial intelligence technology to support decision-making within the firm. It has formed a knowledge transfer partnership with Liverpool University.

Small businesses need a “beefed up” legal system that prevents disputes in the first place and resolves those that occur more, their representative body said today. This includes integrating the online court “seamlessly” with other courts, and a specialist commercial track in the small claims court.

E-mail hacks of conveyancing transactions are the most common cybercrime in the legal sector, with £7m of client losses reported in the last year, according to the Solicitors Regulation Authority. It said that three-quarters of cybercrimes reported to the SRA in the 12 months are some form of ‘Friday afternoon’ fraud.

The government yesterday began laying the ground for the online resolution of certain employment disputes, in the first sector-specific example of plans to transform the justice system. It also set out greater uses of case officers among other recommendations of Lord Justice Briggs that are being adopted.

The BBC has undermined a Law Society call to trial online convictions with cases of TV licensing evasion, after the broadcaster highlighted flaws in its argument. The society has recommended trying out online convictiosn in summary-only, non-imprisonable offences with TV licence evasion.

US legal technology giant LegalZoom has launched its first product since entering the UK market, a ‘digital will’ that it says will “revolutionise the way we think about and plan for our loved ones after our death”. The app enables users to make their will on their phone, and build a “digital scrapbook” to pass on along too.

The Society of Will Writers has launched a blunt campaign to encourage people to make a will, entitled ‘No will equals poo’. The visual featuring the poo emoji is accompanied by a short YouTube video that asks: “Do you want to be remembered only for the mess you leave behind?”