Technology

The team behind LawBot, the legal advice chatbot created last year by Cambridge University law students, is planning a live ‘lawyer v machine’ challenge similar to the one in which IBM’s Watson won the US quiz show Jeopardy. LawBot was relaunched earlier this week and has started signing up law firms keen to secure access to leads generated by the chatbot.

City law firm Kennedys has launched what could become a new route to partnership for members of staff who can dream up ideas for tech products to help clients. Prototypes from the Ideas Lab will be developed in India, before returning home for completion.

A legal tech firm is open source its AI-based document analysis tool next month, in one of the first moves of its kind for the sector. Its co-founder said he believed that the smallest legal tech start-ups could be based on the tool and then “1,000 flowers can bloom”.

The proportion of law firms targeted by scammers has risen sharply over the last year, especially among larger firms, as has the number of practices taking out cyber-insurance, according to new research from the Law Society. The survey on indemnity insurance also showed that a significant minority of brokers continue not to disclose their commission.

City law firm Fieldfisher has invested in “game changer” technology that helps investors and start-ups conclude deals quickly online. SeedLegals describes itself as “the world’s first automated legal service for start-up funding rounds”.

An expanding team of more than 100 HM Land Registry lawyers dealt with 100,000 legal enquiries last year, although the organisation has stepped up digital reform efforts aimed at automating key parts of the registry’s work. For instance, the piloting of a digital mortgage service, part of a plan to enable paper-free legal deeds, will be widened later this year.

The student entrepreneur who developed a ground-breaking free chatbot ‘robot lawyer’ to help people challenge parking tickets is working on an ambitious plan to automate the divorce process with the assistance of a team of salaried paralegals, it has emerged. Josh Browder has obtained funding for legal support from a Silicon Valley venture capital fund.

The Law Commission has set its sights on England and Wales becoming the first major jurisdiction in the world to allow electronic wills by proposing that the Lord Chancellor is given the power to introduce them by statutory instrument. It has also proposed giving the courts the power to treat a document as a will where the formalities are not followed.

A six-month private test of the government’s new online probate service started last month, it has emerged as it looks to digitise the 280,000 applications received each year. As part of the project, HM Courts & Tribunals Service is working to better understand solicitors’ needs to reduce the number of applications that have to be returned.

A hackathon has led to the creation by lawyers and technologies of a free mobile app aimed at helping the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy access support services and information. Legal Hackers Scotland, assisted by Glasgow tech firm Add Jam, put the app together in seven days following the hackathon.

No further public money should be spent on the Online Court until the performance of the newly-expanded online tribunal in British Columbia – which went live for small claims last month – has been assessed, according to veteran justice campaigner Professor Roger Smith.

“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 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.