Practice Management

The tech company that facilitated what it claims is the world’s first smart contract supported by the Internet of Things – internet-enabled devices – has told Legal Futures that its product has layers of security amid fears that the increasingly commonplace technology is vulnerable to hackers.

A niche law firm specialising purely in employee ownership has become an alternative business structure to extend its own scheme to non-lawyers. The firm, a limited company, was one of the first in the country to introduce employee ownership four years ago.

Law firms are being encouraged to get their act together now and come to terms with the new continuing professional development (CPD) regime for solicitors, which comes into force today. Firms can no longer choose to keep the old hours-based approach.

Some universities will incorporate the first stage of the proposed Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) into their law degrees, the education and training director of the Solicitors Regulation Authority has predicted. She said this would make the legal practice course redundant.

The professional indemnity insurer of an insolvent law firm is not required to repay the £581,000 a disbursement funder lost due to the firm’s breach of contract, the Supreme Court has ruled. The justices overturned the Court of Appeal by 4-1.

A ‘disruptive’ legal recruitment app backed by investment from a commercial law firm has signed up thousands of lawyers and dozens of law firms in its first five months, and has just launched in Australia too. It aims to connect legal employers and lawyers without the need for middlemen.

More than one in five law students polled in the UK and the US admit that they would falsify time records for personal and business gain, according to a study of student ethics. Meanwhile, female law students tend to think more in ethical terms than men.

Big law firms will be using predictive analytics and artificial intelligence not only to predict where growth in services will be, but also which clients and cases are worth pursuing, according to PwC’s vision of the law firm of the future that also foresaw digital robots taking over “routine and standard human transactions”.

Artificial intelligence has been used to predict decisions of the European Court of Human Rights to 79% accuracy. Researchers at University College London, the University of Sheffield and the University of Pennsylvania developed the method to analyse case text automatically using a machine learning algorithm.

Solicitors’ professional indemnity insurers paid out around £2bn due to negligence claims in the 10 years to 2014, startling new figures released yesterday by the Solicitors Regulation Authority revealed. The regulator said that around 142,000 claims were made in that decade, one in five of which was successful.

The global legal market is small by comparison with other markets and this is deterring some technology companies from investing in it, but only technology can service the “vast unmet legal need” in the future, according to a leading lawtech commentator.

Law firms need to radically change their cultures to embrace emerging technologies such as cognitive computing – including suppressing their tendency to be risk averse – according to the head of strategy at a leading London practice.

A company buildings contracts that automatically monitor enforcement and one producing software that harmonises legal compliance are among the latest investments to be added to the portfolio of NextLaw Labs, the legal tech subsidiary of global law firm Dentons.

Online dispute resolution “will become the norm for much of the less complex work in civil, family and tribunals jurisdictions”, the Senior President of Tribunals said over the weekend. Meanwhile, it was also predicted that the administration of justice across all courts and tribunals could be transferred to the “cloud” within the next four years.

Four Cambridge university law students have created a free artificial intelligence ‘chatbot’ using natural language input with the aim of clarifying whether a criminal offence has taken place and making it more likely the police will take victims of crime seriously.