Technology

Parliament could harness the power of technology to provide a system to lawmakers that gives them the ability to test speculatively the knock-on effects of legislative changes while they are considering bills, according to IT guru Professor Richard Susskind.

Online wills start-up Farewill hopes to motivate people to make wills by attracting them with simplicity and branded design rather than extensive add-ons. The founders of property website Zoopla and short-term loans business Wonga, together with the tech investment arm of advertising agency M&C Saatchi Plc, have backed the venture.

National direct access chambers Clerksroom is to offer clients pay-as-you-go video conferences with barristers by the end of this year, it has emerged. Clerksroom has also won a place in the final of Disruptive Tech TV’s sales pitch competition – recruiting one of the judges as a client in the process.

The case of three men charged with insider trading based on information they hacked from prominent US law firms “should serve as a wake-up call for law firms around the world”, a New York prosecutor has said.

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.

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.