Technology

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”.

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.

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”.

HM Land Registry plans to live test a ‘Digital Street’ scheme which will enable the “almost instant” transfer of property ownership, backed by technology including blockchain – the secure distributed ledger underpinning the Bitcoin currency – it has emerged.

In-house lawyers have been significantly slower to adopt technology than their counterparts in business, according to a prominent legal technology innovator. Former in-house lawyer D Casey Flaherty, an advisor to Dentons’ lawtech incubator NextLaw Labs, said lawyers as a group were “reluctant” to embrace technology

The technology incubator of London law firm and alternative business structure Mishcon de Reya has chosen six lawtech companies for investment from a shortlist of 19 startups that pitched last month. Two are based in the UK, with the remainder coming from Germany, the US, and India.

In-house lawyers have ranked responsiveness and understanding of their businesses above price as the qualities they most look for when choosing external law firms. One legal counsel at an investment fund said he was “shocked at the poor service we sometimes get” and “often dumbfounded by the poor level of responsiveness”.

A virtual law firm, Keystone Law, has beaten the big players to achieve the highest “success rate” in litigation in the senior courts, a report has found. Data analysts Premonition also said litigants in person were more successful in winning cases as a group than the profession, as it robustly defended its quantitative approach to recording the performance of lawyers.

Two leading lawtech organisations have linked with the judiciary to stage a hackathon which will develop tools aimed at assisting the online court, it has emerged. The Society for Computers and Law, London lawtech community Legal Geek, and the Judiciary of England and Wales, will jointly host the event on 1-2 July.

A contract review technology company incubated by Cambridge-based law firm Taylor Vinters has raised more than $1m in its latest funding round, with investors including former Vodafone UK CEO Guy Laurence, and Michael Findlay, chairman of Morgan Sindall and former co-head of investment banking for Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Lawyers are the not the only ones blocking innovation in larger law firms, the head of IT at DLA Piper has said, highlighting also the need to decentralise responsibility for innovation and allowing it to happen in individual practice groups.