Welcome Huge advances in technology, changes in the way society interacts with

business and deregulation of the market for legal services are fundamentally changing
the way that Lawyers do their work. They certainly do not mean that Lawyers will be
replaced by robots, for the most part, but they do raise some new challenges for those
entering the profession. What we are looking to achieve on this course can be best
summed up in the learning outcomes below: ✓ Explore how the legal profession and
market for legal services operate ✓ Describe the effects of huge advances in technology
on the profession and society in general ✓ Explain the effects of tech and disruption on
the traditional model of Legal Services ✓ Evaluate how technology will change the way
that Lawyers do their jobs ✓ Discuss how important ethics are in a changing legal
industry ✓ Describe the process of Innovation and the effects of Innovation in Law
Over the next three weeks we are going to look at what these changes are, how they
came about, and why they are important. Let’s take a quick look at the course structure.
In week one the course looks at the background to legal innovation and tech, looking at
the legal profession, the market for legal services and how technology is changing
society. In week two we will look at Legal Innovation, by learning what Innovation is,
how it is transforming the business of law and we will look at a case study of a
successful legal entrepreneur. In week three we will examine Legal Tech, it’s a big buzz
word now and the course will examine Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence and put
these tools into context within the profession. The final step will be to discuss ethics in a
changing profession – would you trust a robot lawyer? Throughout the course there
will be articles, quizzes and discussions to help you to cement the learning outcomes
and moreover you can find a wealth of information online on the subject of legal
innovation. Welcome to the course – I hope you enjoy it

The Legal Profession Past and Present Welcome to Week One where we will examine
the background to the changes currently happening within the legal profession. This
week we are going to look at the what lawyers do, The market for Legal Services and
the impact of technology on society. Let’s start by looking at the learning outcomes for
this week, the aim is that we can tick these off by the end of this step. • Explore how the
legal profession and market for legal services operate • Describe the effects of huge
advances in technology on the profession and society in general Traditionally, Lawyers
are split into solicitors and barristers. The main difference being that, put simply,
Barristers tend to practice as advocates in courts, whereas Solicitors tend to work in
offices. There are however these days some crossovers. As a general rule Solicitors work
out of law firms, of which there are many types and sizes. From a small office on the
high street to huge firms in the City of London and internationally. They tend to be
structured like a pyramid. Lots of junior lawyers, slightly fewer senior lawyers to
manage them and then the partners who run the firm, share the profits and carry the
risk at the top. Barristers on the other hand tend to work in Chambers and are usually
self-employed. The chambers has clerks who keep chambers diaries up-to-date,
calculate and negotiate fees for the work.The Barrister pays the chambers a rent, which
is usually a percentage of their income. In today’s legal marketplace though there are
more than just Solicitors and Barristers, there is also Legal Executives, Notaries,
Licensed Conveyancers, Patent and TM attorneys and Costs Drafts men What the legal
profession does share though is a model. That is that the client comes to see them, gets
advice and they are sent a bill for their Lawyers time. So who buys Legal Services? The
obvious answer is businesses. From global giants to a business run from someone’s
living room every company needs help to navigate the complex web of company law.
There is also family law, criminal law, property law, employment, wills and probate,
environmental, human rights, tax and many many more besides. Within this you ll
notice that most of these services are for everyone, not just those big companies.
Divorces happen, wills need to be made, people move houses or have issues at work.
What is important is that everyone has access to these firms, because that is a part of the
rule of law. It is not hard to find Criticisms of Legal Services though. Google Lawyer
jokes and you will see what I mean. One of the biggest Criticisms about Lawyers is the
cost. As we saw, Lawyers tend to charge for their time and this has also brought about a
perceived lack of competition, after all for many clients, hourly billing appears not to be
an enormous incentive to become more competitive. The idea of cost also raises
arguments about access to justice, mainly the idea that the more money I have the better
lawyer I can afford. Whilst this is not necessarily true it is certainly an idea expounded
by the media. With all this in mind, and for other reasons, the Legal Services Act 2007
was introduced, and it fundamentally changed the legal landscape in England and
Wales. One of its aims was to increase competition, flexibility, transparency and choice
for consumers of legal services. It did this in part by allowing, for the first time, non-
lawyers to run law firms. These alternative business structures mean that established
big companies could get involved in legal services and benefit from the cost advantage
of having an already big scale operation. At the time this was dubbed “Tesco Law”
because it opened access to all kinds of companies, like supermarkets to enter the
marketplace. This didn’t quite happen as expected and companies were slow to take up
legal licences. Though Co-Op legal services did and have grown to employ over 600
people. One other key criticism of Lawyers is how slow the profession has been to
embrace technology. The problem is that this is now catching up on legal services and
there are several reasons why. To really understand this it is important to look at how
Tech has infiltrated and changed society. • Society and Technology The starting point is
Moore's law, the idea that the number of transistors and resistors on a chip doubles
every two years is absolutely central to understanding how technology has had such a
vast and speedy impact on society. This is the reason why iPhones, iPads, laptops, can
become smaller, lighter, quicker, like Bill Gates says it really has made remarkable
things possible. If you consider that in the last 18 years UK mobile phone ownership UK
home computer ownership UK home Internet Connexions have doubled. It’s here when
you start to see how it is that the technology is not just transforming our daily lives it's
transforming the way that we interact with businesses and this is truly remarkable.
Think of all the apps on your phone and the many possibilities at your fingertips, you
can transfer money across the world in seconds, consult a doctor or a vet at the touch of
a button. You can Order a pizza or a taxi to your door, set up a direct debit, do your
shopping, the possibilities are endless. But 20 years ago in order to do almost all of
these things you'd have to go somewhere or have a conversation with somebody.
Search engines too have a part to play. Most people who need a service will start with
google, where again 20 years ago they may have used word of mouth or the phone
book. Business now has to look at the Client Journey – how their client reaches them, in
detail. There needs to be a solid website with excellent SEO. Advertising to familiarise
the potential customers. All this so that when a customer needs to find a service, that
company are right there in his mind. All of this opens huge possibilities. Consider that
the three of the most recognisable companies on earth are all web based – Amazon,
Facebook and Uber. Furthermore, Facebook does not produce it’s own content and
Uber does not own any taxis. The final piece of the jigsaw is the tech available – it is not
just mobiles, tablets and the internet. Automation and Artificial Intelligence are now
capable of performing the more mundane tasks of doing business. Whether it is
remembering your purchase history, sending out invoices based on time recording or
searching through documents, it frees up professionals to become more specialist and
more niche – we ll explore this in detail in week three. As is clear, 21st Century business
operate in new ways. Tech has allowed us to reach more people, to make transactions
and jobs quicker and more efficient. In law the legal services act has opened new doors
for ABS to compete with traditional law firms and all this is starting to threaten the
traditional models. Therefore the Legal Profession is changing. IF we return to this
week’s learning outcomes, hopefully you should now be able to tick off these first two.
• Explore how the legal profession and market for legal services operate • Describe the
effects of huge advances in technology on the profession and society in general To make
sure that you have met the outcomes there is a quiz to test your knowledge on the next
step. Thanks for listening.

WEEK 2

Welcome Welcome to week two, where we are going to look at Innovation, its use in the
legal profession, an example of a successful legal innovator, before discussing the
importance of ethics in a changing legal world. But first, as ever, the learning outcomes:
• Describe the process of Innovation and the effects of Innovation in Law • Explore the
effects of disruption on the traditional model of Legal Services • Discuss how important
ethics are in a changing legal industry What is Innovation There are literally hundreds
of different ways to define Innovation. The best is the most simple - “the introduction of
something new”. It tends to come from a creative process. Sitting looking at something,
thinking that there must be a better way to do this. Trying different things, different
ways, failing, getting frustrated. And then suddenly an idea comes. When it does it
usually seems like the most obvious solution, which is often why we see great
innovation and think, I wish I had thought of that. Clearly innovating is nothing new–
Humans have been innovating since the dawn of time. Practically everything around us
is the result of innovation. You can group different types of innovation into three
primary categories. Incremental, Radical and Disruptive. As you can probably tell from
the examples though, there are crossovers and equally arguments about what Radical
and Disruptive really mean. Most innovation is made up Incremental Innovation –
when something changes little by little – the best examples of these are the major brands
like Coca Cola that tap into emerging trends and bring out new or improved products
to reflect a changing demand. Look at supermarkets who grow and adapt too with the
times, with their products, or self-checkouts, or online shopping. Always looking to
improve or make things more efficient pays off and keeps the big companies at the
forefront. Radical Innovation issomething completely new to solve a problem – a
gamechanger. Netflix is a great example of this. They originally offered a web-based
DVD rental store, where you ordered a film and it would be delivered the next day.
Once you finished it you posted it back. It transformed the industry and is one of the
big reasons we no longer see a blockbuster on every street corner. MP3’s and iPod are
another example that absolutely transformed an industry. Disruptive Innovation is all
about a tool or a technology to massively effect the way an industry operates. As we
saw in week 1, the best example of this is the internet and how it was effectively a game
changer for the way society interacts with business. Whichever of these types the
innovation fits into, the approach is the same. It involves the knowledge of or looking at
a process and working out how it can be improved using the best tools or technology
available. Many 21st century innovations rely on the use of information technology.
Process analysis can often start with a series of post it notes with each step of the
process stuck to a whiteboard, but there’s other ways. Once you have stripped back a
process you can look at how to improve it. To put this into context. Take a common job
for junior lawyers or paralegals – document analysis. Not many years ago in order to
find the important parts of documents, junior lawyers would spend hours searching
through many lever arch files. The process is simple. The files arrived often by courier,
in a van. They are carried to a large room. Junior lawyers are paid to sit and to read
through the documents searching for key phrases or important facts. The result is a
folder of organised evidence. This process is inefficient, costly and time consuming. The
juniors are engaged in a process that is not their speciality and could be better
employed elsewhere in the business. Step forward Artificial Intelligence, which we will
look at in depth next week. Documents can then be scanned in, reducing delivery
issues. AI can not only read the documents, but can also rank them in importance, find
key phrases and highlight them in a report. All for a fraction of the cost and time. This
leads us nicely onto the next section. Innovation in law.

MODULE: THE FUTURE OF LAW FIRMS PART 1 VIDEO SCRIPT Tutor Hello and
welcome to this next video where we’ll explore the future of law firms. We’re in the
early stages of a fundamental change in the legal profession. There have been some big
developments that have changed the speed at which lawyers work, but not all that
much has fundamentally changed the way that lawyers work in the last 100 years.
Photocopiers, emails, electronic registers and online case reports are all big changes to
the speed at which work is done, but the changes that are coming will affect the way the
work is done. Law firms will employ different people with different skills. Legal work
will be done in a very different way. The number of law firms will change, and the way
law firms win work and bill their clients will be different. Tutor There are three main
pressures facing law firms - to do more with less, to provide a more commercial service
and to embrace technology. Let’s talk first about doing more with less. For many years,
law firms have said to their clients you can’t save money on your fees. We keep you out
of trouble, we make sure that you are on the right side of the law and we keep you out
of prison. Price shouldn’t be an issue. The Future of Law Firms_Part 1 2 ©The
University of Law Since the financial crash of 2007/2008, a lot of companies have been
saying to their lawyers I don’t care, do it for less money. All over the UK firms of all
sizes have been reducing their external legal budgets and saying to their law firms I still
want the same service, just do it for less. Tutor Especially in corporate and commercial
clients, there’s a lot more compliance and regulatory work than ever before. Recent
legislation, like GDPR and MiFID II have only increased this burden further. When
there is more work to do and budgets are falling, it increases the pressure on law firms.
As an initial response to these pressures, quite a lot of large law firms look to lower
their costs by relocating bits of themselves to cities that were cheaper than London,
either within the UK known as near-shoring, or outside the UK, known as offshoring.
These approaches have declined in the last couple of years as law firms look at the
possibility of using technology to speed up their work instead. Tutor Law firms also
need to provide a more commercial service. There is often inherent tension between a
client and a law firm. The law firm wants to give perfect legal advise that cannot be
questioned. A shining halo of legal brilliance and the client doesn’t care. They just want
to make money. Clients often want advice that is good enough for them to make an
informed decision, but that advice doesn’t have to be The Future of Law Firms_Part 1 3
©The University of Law perfect. Corporate clients often look upon legal advise as they
would exchange rate risk. They are prepared to accept a chance they made the wrong
bet as long as they can make decisions with good information and make those decisions
quickly and cheaply. Lawyers are scared of getting it wrong and need their advice to
dot all the “I”s and cross all the “T”s. This fundamental tension has led to a huge rise of
in-house lawyers in the past 20 years. In-house lawyers will make those good enough
quick decisions that external lawyers are so worried about. External lawyers are also, in
general, quite bad at adding commercial value. They don’t often turn around to clients
and say we analyse the contracts you gave us and found you could move a lot of your
work to your Bristol office and save yourself money. This kind of non-legal added value
really impresses clients and keeps them coming back. Lawyers are often in a good
position to comb through client’s contracts, commercial relationships and data, but they
are not using that opportunity to help their clients, because they do not have the right
tools. Tutor The other two main pressures, doing more with less and being more
commercial, can be solved at least in part by embracing technology. Law firms are
notoriously risk adverse and change adverse. As a profession we’re very slow to
embrace new technology. We are moving in the right direction, but the pace of change
is slow. If law firms don’t do it someone else will. The Future of Law Firms_Part 1 4
©The University of Law Embracing technology has the added benefit of not only
solving a lot of the pressures on a law firm, but also demonstrating to clients that the
law firm understands and welcomes technology. As more and more clients are tech
based, or at least increasing their focus on tech, this increases the synergy between law
firms and clients. The top five most valuable companies are all technology companies in
one way or another, and apart from Microsoft they’ve all been fairly recent additions to
the top five. Technology is big business. Tutor We can turn around attention now to the
billable hour, a tried and tested way of billing the client. But the billable hour is a
horribly antiquated way of forming a bill. It keeps all the risk with the client and none
of the risk with the lawyer. If the matter takes longer than expected the client pays
more. The lawyer is never out of pocket. People who charge by the hour have little
incentive to work efficiently. The longer it takes the more they get paid. This model will
simply not survive in the modern world. There are already signs that the billable hour is
on its way out. However, most of the current alternatives to the billable hour are simply
an estimate of what the billable hour costs would be, but changed into a different
format, like a fixed fee. A fixed fee that is based on the estimated billable hours gives
the client certainty and puts some risk on to the law firm. But it does not fundamentally
change the way services are charged. Tutor The Future of Law Firms_Part 1 5 ©The
University of Law One big objection clients have at the moment is paying for junior
lawyers to do mundane work, work that could be automated or given to someone less
qualified and therefore less expensive. They also don’t want to pay for junior lawyers to
be trained on their time. The future will likely bring with it a way of billing by how
much value the client puts on the service they’re getting, rather than the cost to the
lawyers. This raises all sorts of interesting questions about technology. How do the
clients pay for the use of software? You can’t charge your software programme out by
the hour. It may have cost you millions to develop it, but how do you charge for it now?
Could we see a subscription model for legal services, where clients pay a monthly or a
yearly fee for access to a suite of legal services. Or by volume of work. Some
accountants even bill by the weight of paper they’re asked to review. Will lawyers start
to share the risk with the client and take larger or smaller fees depending on how
profitable a deal is. Risk is a key factor that corporate clients want lawyers to share in,
and by sharing risk it will inevitably make law firms more focused on helping the client
as a whole rather than just providing legal advice. Tutor Let’s talk a little bit about the
changing roles in the legal profession. There will be different people employed in law
firms in the future. Particularly, we will see the rise of the legal technologist, a term,
used to describe people adept at technology in the area of law. In general, the rise of
technology and a focus on diversity, will see a greater focus on non-law graduates,
particularly maths, science and technology. The first wave of legal tech pioneers that we
are seeing now are often lawyers with an interest in tech, but in the longer term these
people are unlikely to be qualified The Future of Law Firms_Part 1 6 ©The University of
Law lawyers. Instead they will have a tech background with some training or
experience in the legal market. Legal technologists will be essential to provide the AI
services and software packages that will set the law firm apart, and they will collaborate
with the lawyers to do so. Tutor It’s not just theory either. The SRA approved a seating
technology as part of the training contract in 2018 as pioneered by Riverview Law. A&O
and Addleshaw Goddard have also made significant strides towards creating this
career path, with the equivalent of legal technologists’ trainee roles and career paths
created in 2018. Another example is Pinsent Masons, which currently employs a wide
range of people who are not lawyers. They currently employ document automation
specialists, legal engineers who do the process mapping, building workflow systems
and automating them, data scientists, digital designers for websites. Technologists who
are not necessarily legal technologists, but apply technology more generally. Project
managers and forensic accountants. All these people in Pinsent Masons are client
facing, that they work on client matters and have their time recorded to a file, not
necessarily to bill it, just to record it. This range of employees brings together the skills
needed to tackle a lot of the issues we’ve discussed earlier about doing more with less,
providing a more commercial service and embracing technology. Tutor The Future of
Law Firms_Part 1 7 ©The University of Law It is likely that in the future legal
technologists will have a career route similar to trainees with the opportunity to make it
to partnership level later on. Here is the traditional model of a law firm. It follows a
pyramid structure with a higher ratio of junior lawyers to partners. Law firms are
expecting a lot of junior lawyers to leave the firm before they become partners for one
reason or another. The pool of junior employees also includes employees who will not
be lawyers, like secretaries for example. Law firms currently look a bit like this. The
structure remains fairly similar to the traditional structure, but you can see that certain
tasks are outsourced and automated. Outsourcing and automation are impacting the
junior employees most of all. In the future, it is likely that we may see something like
this. In this model you can see the number of junior lawyers is similar to the number of
partners, meaning that firms are not expecting as many people to leave. Firms will be
much more selective about who they recruit, but once you are through the door it is a
much smoother route to partnership. Tutor As a percentage of legal employees, this will
mean fewer traditional trainees and a more diverse range of jobs and skills within a law
firm. Technology becomes a big percentage of the firm’s employees, as does project
management and paralegals. It has been predicted that there will be a legal technologist
promoted to partner level in the magic circle by the end of 2020 and I’m inclined to
agree with this view. The Future of Law Firms_Part 1 8 ©The University of Law All this
change is because of technology. As it improves this means that less qualified people
can perform tasks that were previously done by junior lawyers. So with the aid of
software it’s likely paralegals or even clients themselves may be able to perform some of
the jobs that used to require lawyers to do. This does not mean that there’ll be fewer
lawyers necessarily. There are plenty of people out there who want legal advice at the
moment and can’t get it. As the price of legal advice falls it’s likely that demand will go
up, and there will be more work overall, even if parts of it are automated.
The Future of Law Firms_Part 2 1 ©The University of Law MODULE: THE FUTURE OF
LAW FIRMS PART 2 VIDEO SCRIPT Tutor We can now talk about how the legal
market will become more polarised between bespoke and commoditised work.
Commoditised work is where there is little to differentiate one law firm from another.
They do the job you give them and it doesn’t matter much who does it. Bespoke is just
the opposite. It matters a lot who does the work for you and how they do it. Orange
juice is a commoditised product. It’s basically all the same stuff. You don’t care very
much who made it, you’ll pretty much buy the cheapest product. Top end wine is just
the opposite, it’s as bespoke product. People are prepared to pay a huge amount of
money for particular vineyards and vintages. Tutor There is likely to be a greater split
in the legal profession between bespoke and commoditised work. As more and more
work becomes commoditised due to technology a lot of law firms will see themselves
with a choice, move into bespoke work or compete in a commoditised market.
Commoditised work will complete mainly on price with small profit margins available
per piece of work, but they will be able to undertake a large volume of work. So firms
will be looking for efficiency and to The Future of Law Firms_Part 2 2 ©The University
of Law automate as much as they can. This is likely to lead to mergers between law
firms to maximum the economies of scale in the commoditised market. Firms that are
successful in developing efficient or automated systems will increase their market share
and be able to retain or even increase their overall profitability. For example, a law firm
which develops an app or a programme which solves a particular legal problem could
sell that app to a near unlimited number of clients. The restrictions on capacity of office
space that you would find in traditional legal work just won’t apply. Tutor This is likely
to put a huge strain on really small firms who can’t match the investment in tech of
their larger competitors. They will be selling the same commoditised service at a more
expensive price, which is not a good business model. Really small firms can still carve
out a role for themselves, for example, in providing a local personal face-to-face service,
but it will be tough. Bespoke work will be much less affected by automation, certainly
in the medium term, and will remain profitable as it hard to replicate en masse. But as
we have previously said, even bespoke work has elements to it which are mundane.
The decomposition of work will mean that in order to stay competitive the law firms
bespoke work will still have to strive to embrace efficiency and automate parts of their
work. When it comes to the really big ticket work, the once in a lifetime, bet the farm
deals, the merger’s worth billions, there is a good argument to say an extra few
thousand in The Future of Law Firms_Part 2 3 ©The University of Law legal fees won’t
matter to the client. The thinking is that there is no need to strive for efficiency gains if
you are doing this type of work. That was certain true 10 years ago and there is some
truth to it today, but I don’t believe this thinking will last another 10 years. Tutor We’ll
round out this video with a discussion of disruption and diversification in law firms.
Accountancy firms have been great examples in moving out of their core areas to add
value to clients. They offer a huge range of management as well as consultancy services
and many other things besides. Clients want any advice that helps their business.
They’re not only looking for legal advice. With access to a lot of client’s data law firms
should be using technology to branch out into other commercial services. The big four
accountancy firms are acquiring legal expertise, a legal reputation and they are already
equipped with diverse commercial offerings for clients. Traditionally, they’re also better
at using technology in their businesses. They’re not yet challenging for elite legal work,
but they are growing in capability. Law firms could learn a lot from these examples.
Tutor Imagine a website which compares law firms’ prices or even individual lawyers’
prices for particular jobs. Picture a comparison website like Comparethemarket or
MoneySupermarket for lawyers. It’s not exactly a stretch of the imagination for The
Future of Law Firms_Part 2 4 ©The University of Law standard jobs to be quoted for in
this way. This would allow individuals to compete with law firms on smaller jobs. The
cost of advertising and the high street office space would no longer be necessary. Tutor
The gig economy has begun in earnest with firms like Uber and Airbnb allowing people
to offer their services as they like rather than under a contract. Legal services have
already shown signs of moving towards a more flexible model where individual
lawyers can be added or removed from a team easily. Sometimes there’s a peak of
work, sometimes there’s a trough. Axiom Law and Lawyers on Demand are two early
adopters of this model. Another possible future is that clients form conglomerates to
reduce legal spend. Instead of simple regulatory or compliance work being repeated for
10 different clients, those clients may club together and only pay for the advice once. If
they can do it law firms could end up supplying clients with software that will allow
them to perform their own legal work. In this way some law firms could end up being
software developers rather than giving advice directly. Law firms at the moment
mainly use a partnership model and most law firms pay out a 100% of profits each year.
This doesn’t lend itself well to funding long term projects and the partnership model
may well have to change. Tutor The Future of Law Firms_Part 2 5 ©The University of
Law As the world changes new areas of law will come into being and old ones will
cease to exist. Software, or even objects, can be programmes that they must stay with in
certain boundaries. Imagine self-driving cars that cannot speed and cannot be driven
drunk. There is no need for a lot of road traffic advice. As old areas of law shrink new
ones grow. The regulation of the use of data is one such growth area, with GDPR
experts in huge demand at the moment. This trend will only increase as more data is
produced and more can be done with that data. Real change in the legal industry may
come from a tech giant entering a legal market. In November 2016, IBM bought a
financial consulting firm which gave legal advice on regulatory and compliance
matters. When IBM puts the data it acquires from this law firm into Watson, which is a
very advanced piece of AI software, there is no telling how much it will be able to
accomplish. Firms like IBM, Google and Microsoft have global reach, near unlimited
budgets and tech expertise. More importantly, they are not tied to the old ways and can
approach it with fresh eyes. Tutor This takes us to the end of this video on the Future of
Law Firms. We’ve explored some of the major changes that are likely to be coming our
way in the next few years and how the legal landscape may alter. We’ll see firms
making greater use of technology and changing the people they employ as a result.
We’ll also likely see The Future of Law Firms_Part 2 6 ©The University of Law that
technology create different ways of billing clients and a more noticeable split between
those firms who do commoditised work and those who do bespoke work. Look out for
our next video where we’ll explore entrepreneurship, design thinking and cognitive
diversity. Thank you for watching.

The World's first Robot Lawyer?

26 comments

It all started in 2015 when new driver Joshua Browder received a 30 parking tickets in
his first few months on the road. He became, by his own admission, well acquainted
with the appeals process. As he became more successful in the appeals, he began to
help friends and family too. An experienced coder, he reportedly taught himself to
code age 8, Browder stripped down the appeals process into steps that would produce
a letter to send to the local council. Using a chat-bot he was able to make the process
quick and easy, and open to all and with that DoNotPay.co.uk was born. Users fill in
their details, choose the most relevant defence and the bot generates an “appeal”
letter, all in under 30 seconds.

In it’s first 4 months, DoNotPay reportedly saved motorists “£2 million”. A drop in the
ocean when you consider that councils in England had made more than £600 million in
parking fines in the previous year. With increasing volumes Browder noted that there
appeared to be a disproportionate “targeting” of elderly and disabled motorists and
small business. Indeed, in a BBC interview, he was asked if he was a modern-day Robin
Hood.

Fast forward 5 years and DoNotPay has just raised $12 million in funding to develop
further. I offers a variety of automated services and boasts that using it you can “Fight
Corporations, Beat Bureaucracy, Find Hidden Money, Sue Anyone and even
Automatically Cancel Your Free Trials”, which is some war cry for the worlds first
robot lawyer.
The first step in this case study is to have a look at DoNotPay.com. Explore the website
and the learning centre.

Then follow the links below to learn more about “the worlds first robot lawyer”

Week 3

Welcome to week three of the course. So far we have covered the past and present of
the legal profession, looked at innovation and had a glimpse at of the future of law
firms. This week we are going to look at Legal tech and the techie tools that are at the
heart of the legal revolution. The final challenge is to look back on all you have learned
and to join the discussion on whether you would trust a robot lawyer? The learning
outcomes for this week are below. As ever try to make sure that you can tick them off
by the end of the week’s activities. Evaluate how technology will change the way that
Lawyers do their jobs Discuss how important ethics are in a changing legal industry
Legal Tech is a buzzword. It can mean almost anything, from lawyers with laptops and
mobiles all the way to advanced ai and chatbots. In truth it means using tech or
software to streamline the business of law. This week you will learn about two big new
technologies that, correctly implemented, have the ability to radically change how we
practise law, the first one is on breaking down ai and its on the next step

Breaking Down Legal_AI 1 ©The University of Law MODULE: BREAKING DOWN

LEGAL AI VIDEO SCRIPT Tutor Hi, and welcome to this second instalment in the
ULTRA Series, where we’ll explore what we mean by AI. AI is a term with no definite
meaning. The term – artificial intelligence – is applied when a machine mimics
cognitive functions that we associated with human minds. It’s just learning and
problem solving. Tutor The scope of AI is uncertain at the best of times, and to make
things even more confusing it’s a moving target. As machines become increasingly
capable, tasks considered as requiring intelligence are often removed from the
definition. For instance, optical character recognition is now frequently excluded from
artificial intelligence, having become a routine technology. Tutor It must much more
helpful to break it down into different categories. Different software may use multiple
categories, but it helps to understand how the systems work. We will only discuss
things relevant to legal AI, for example, robotics is usually considered a part of AI, but
it is not yet relevant to lawyers. Here’s another quote for Breaking Down Legal_AI 2
©The University of Law you to kick things off. It’s only AI when you don’t know how it
works. Once you know how it works, it’s just software. Tutor For our first dive into AI,
let’s talk about machine-learning. It broadly breaks down into two main parts –
supervised learning and unsupervised learning. Supervised learning at its most basic is
where a machine pairs an input to an output. It’s usually a number or a particular tag.
Let’s say you wanted to categorise millions of pictures of pets into sub-categories, cats
and dogs. You could take the first few hundred pictures and tell the machine this is a
picture of a cat. This is also a cat. This is a dog. The machine would then use that data to
categorise the remaining few million pictures. In a legal context this may be used to
identify a particular clause, such as a jurisdiction clause, or the amount of salary in an
employment contract. Tutor Unsupervised learning is where the machine clusters
groups based on the level of similarity. So you may give it a particular clause or a
document and the machine looks for similar items. The machine will find clauses or
documents that have similar wording to the original and you can set the parameters so
you get what you are looking for. The machine is the one using various algorithms to
find the groups rather than relying on human reinforcement. Tutor Semi supervised or
reinforcement learning uses unsupervised learning technology with human
reinforcement at stages along the way. The machine tries to group things Breaking
Down Legal_AI 3 ©The University of Law and then the human says you’ve got this bit
right, you’ve got the other bit wrong, learn from it and adjust. With most of these
systems there’s often a trade-off between getting everything you’re looking for and
getting only the things that you’re looking for. Imagine a barrelful of marbles, all sorts
of marbles all different colours. I asked the machine to find orange marbles. Now the
machine has a fairly good idea what I mean by orange, but the problem comes round
the edges. What about tangerine, ginger, how about scarlet coloured marbles. If the
machine gives me everything that’s vaguely orange I may have too many marbles to
look through. If it’s more selective then it may miss out the marble that I need. To put it
all in a legal context and let’s be extremely about it, if I were looking for a particular
clause in a contract, if the search returns every clause in the document it will definitely
have the one I need, but also lots that’s irrelevant. Even though it has brought me the
right clause, the volume of irrelevant information makes it useless. On the flip side, if it
returns no clauses it will definitely not have any irrelevant clauses, but it will also be
missing the right one. There is often a balance between these two competing objectives,
including the right thing and not including anything irrelevant, with the perfect balance
being difficult to achieve. Tutor Now let’s move on to talk about expert systems. Expert
systems apply an automated decision tree to a series of data. It’s the equivalent of a
complicated flow chart. The data it relies on can either be entered manually or
harvested from the machine reading the documents. So the machine could look for the
jurisdiction clause and Breaking Down Legal_AI 4 ©The University of Law identify that
it’s England and Wales, or you could manually tag a contract with the jurisdiction. This
data would then be used to complete the decision tree. For example, is the transaction
over £5,000? If yes, move to this step, if no move to the other step. Tutor The creation of
the decision tree requires humans to programme it, so the better the lawyer
programming it the better the result will be. This system offers key advantages over
human beings in that it will always apply the decision tree in the same way, tirelessly,
without billable hours and without mistakes. However, these systems don’t work well
with grey areas or matters that require discretion. Systems can be used to produce
particular outputs, such amending a draft document or they can be used to flag
documents for human review. For example, if you put 20,000 contract into the system
and asked it to check for all of the following criteria, contracts over £50,000 which do
not have a limitation clause, which were entered into less than 6 years ago, and are
between firm X and firm Y, then it could send all those positive matches to a lawyer for
review. Tutor One key use of expert systems has been to automate parts of the drafting
process. Documents used in law firms almost always follow precedents and these
precedents largely have amendments that can be predicted. By putting in key bits of
information the software can add or remove certain clauses automatically, put in
names, dates, facts and figures in all the places that they are referred to without making
cross referencing errors. Some of these contracts can be very long and refer to a party
Breaking Down Legal_AI 5 ©The University of Law hundreds of times. Removing or
adding a clause may have an impact on the numbering or referencing to later clauses,
and having this done for you saves time and mistakes. Most documents, however, still
need some form of bespoking, so the software will not do all the drafting for you, but it
will speed up the process a lot. Tutor Now let’s explore natural language processing.
This focuses on getting machines to understand what we say, both orally and in written
form. It does use optical character recognition, both for typed fonts and handwriting,
but that isn’t really the clever bit anymore. What it does do is allows machines to make
sense of context and meaning rather than just reading the individual words. The
intricacy and accuracy of legal drafting has made this a challenging area and machines
are much better at recognising what a clause is rather than exactly what it does. So a
machine could tell you that clause X contains the names of the parties and who the
parties are. It would also recognise an arbitration clause. What it wouldn’t be good at
doing is working out if the arbitration clause applies in a particular set of circumstances.
Tutor Moving on, let’s discuss data analytics. Big data and meta data. Data just can’t be
handled in the way it used to be. There is so much more data now than ever before.
Nowadays, every two days we create more data than was created between the dawn of
civilisation and 2003. A Rolodex and a filing cabinet won’t be enough to stay on top of
things. Breaking Down Legal_AI 6 ©The University of Law Data analytics, a form of
machine learning, uses past data to predict future events, such as how long a piece of
litigation will last, how much it will costs and how much it is likely to settle for. For a
more tangible example you can work out the cheapest time to buy a plane ticket using
big data. It doesn’t look at any particular plane ticket, it doesn’t know if the plane that
this ticket belonged to was full or empty, or if the price of fuel had gone up or down.
However, by putting together trends from millions of searches it can give an accurate
picture of when you are most likely to get the best deal - which is 70 days before your
flight, by the way. Big data provides a lot of raw material for legal data analytics.
Machines can now store and process huge quantities of data, and as more and more of
our work is digitised that data becomes more reliable. Tutor By using thousands or
millions of data points it can find trends without relying on individual examples. It
doesn’t understand why a particular case won or lost, or why one settled and another
didn’t. What it does do is look for trends and percentages. Metadata is usually created
when digital information is created. It includes things like the time and date it was
created, the type of the file, how big the file is, who the creator was, which computer it
was created on, how many times it was edited, that sort of thing. It’s often called data
about data. It adds to the available pool of information and is a very valuable resource.
Data analytics within law firms are most easily and most often used to improve admin
functions. So timekeeping, billing and costs are high on the priority list. However, the
Breaking Down Legal_AI 7 ©The University of Law more difficult areas, such as using
it to help predict the outcome of cases or helping a client’s business will be the most
fruitful if the law firms can achieve it. Tutor Next up is process automation. Process
automation is where a machine takes over a whole task that was previously done by a
human being. In the case of disclosure, for example, in 2016, a London court allowed
the use of predictive coding software to decide which documents to disclose. Time
recording software automates the old process of manually recording timesheets and
voice dictation software, like Dragon Naturally Speaking automates some of the
function of secretarial typing pools. One of the key tasks that has been automated, at
least partly, is legal research. The search functions within legal databases replace
human beings walking around libraries and looking things up in different indexes. This
is also evolving quickly. Modern AI tools, like ROS, allow much faster and more
accurate research than is possible by humans alone. Tutor Finally, let’s look at
collaboration tools. Collaboration tools, like the Cloud or video conferencing, allow
lawyers to work from different locations and collaborate more effectively on the same
project. This also includes document management systems that create, file and link
documents together in a way that’s secure, easily searchable, organised and with
features like version control. They also contribute to providing accurate and complete
data for data analytics. Tutor Breaking Down Legal_AI 8 ©The University of Law Let’s
look to science fiction to round this section off. Arthur C Clarke said any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It may seem that magic is being
performed in front of our eyes when documents can be read, understood and processed
by machines. This capability will only improve. But we must remember that there are
specific mechanisms at work here. There are systems and software at work, there is no
magic. And there certainly is no human level intelligence in anything other than
humans just yet. There is just code and software that does what it tells you to, even if
that is very clever.

Blockchain 1 ©The University of Law MODULE: BLOCKCHAIN VIDEO SCRIPT Tutor

Hello and welcome to this video on Blockchain, which is the technology that did the
most to enable smart contracts. Blockchain is shrouded in mystery. No-one even knows
who invented it. When you talk about the blockchain the first thing that most people
think of is Bitcoin, and Bitcoin skyrocketed in value and then partly crashed, so people
made and lost a lot of money. So the whole thing must be risky, right? Well, no.
Blockchain is the technology that Bitcoin was founded on. Blockchain and Bitcoin are
not the same thing. Think of blockchain as electricity and Bitcoin as the lightbulb.
Electricity can be used in a lot more ways than just lightbulbs. Tutor Blockchain is a
giant database. It records who owns what. Bitcoin solved a problem. How can a virtual
coin have a value if it can just be copied? Digital things like digital pictures can be
copied multiple times. The sender and the recipient are both likely to have a copy. So
how could that work with a currency? The sender and the recipient shouldn’t both own
the money. Blockchain gives you a register of who owns what. The coins now can’t be
duplicated, because they are not just digital copies, they are only valid if verified by the
register. Blockchain 2 ©The University of Law Encryption makes the register safer and
blockchain pairs a public key with a private key to ensure safety. For all intense and
purposes it’s unhackable. So blockchain was the first system to solve this double
spending problem, two copies of the same money. Tutor So far, this doesn’t sound very
different to a system that a bank uses. Banks records who owns what and they’re
secure. But Bitcoin created what is known as a decentralised or distributed ledger. A
decentralised ledger means that there is no one person or company keeping a record.
Instead, people using the system keep a record. So instead of having the Land Registry
record all the transaction the people who use the Land Registry would have their own
copy of every transaction. Tutor This has several key benefits. No central body, secure,
transparent, permanent. There is no central body, which means it’s cheaper and quicker
to process transactions. There is no single point of failure, no-one has to give permission
for you to do anything, that means no waiting, no fees. You are essentially removing the
middleman. Blockchain is very secure. Changing an entry via fraud is almost
impossible because it is checked against thousands of other copies of the ledger. If Jane
or a hacker changes her copy of the ledger to give herself an extra million Bitcoins, all
the other copies of the register will reject this change. They call this tamper evident.
Blockchain is also transparent. The ledger is open to all users to see. The names may be
anonymised, but the fact that participant X owns A, B and C and when they bought
Blockchain 3 ©The University of Law them will clearly be shown. Blockchain is
permanent. Histories can’t be erased or changed. It’s great for certainty, but not so good
for the right to be forgotten. It does mean it can’t be censored by anyone. Tutor Imagine
you wanted to buy a second-hand car. A the moment you’ve got two main options, a
private sale, probably advertised through a website or going to a car dealership. The
private sale is better value but you run the risk of buying a car with something wrong
with it, or possibly even a stolen one. Now the dealership is more expensive, but it gives
you certainty because it’s reputable and it does checks for you. A system running on
blockchain would be even cheaper than the private sale and even more certain than the
dealership. Blockchain would be able to show you in one place which cars are for sale
and all their features. It would have details of who bought the car, who they sold it to,
when it was serviced, if it was involved in an accident, when the MOT was done and
many more facts. All this data is recorded on a database that is virtually impossible to
tamper with. And you could buy the car pretty much instantly and without the need for
a lot of paperwork and wasting time having someone check who you are, who the seller
is, the details of the car, the origin of the money you’re transferring, et cetera, et cetera.
Tutor The net result is that transactions like car purchases would be reduced to a few
minutes instead of a few days. Travel agents effectively died as a profession because
they were a middleman that were charging a fee but not adding value. Online reviews
and online booking got rid of the need for travel agents. A lot of intermediaries don’t
add value. They just facilitate transactions. Intermediaries in Blockchain 4 ©The
University of Law general check the ID of the parties, create trust, settle the transaction,
keep records validated by the auditors or regulators, but they also cost money and are
generally slow. For example, sending money abroad using an intermediary, especially
to troubled countries can take five days and cost 50% of the money you were
transferring. Because of the features described earlier, blockchain has what is often
called automated trust. On blockchain systems everyone can trust each other, and the
information in the database because it’s so secure. So you can trust a perfect strange to
pay you or deliver a service. What’s even better is that this trust is instant, no checks, no
fees, no waiting. Blockchain could get rid of the middleman in a wide range of
industries. This could be the end of not only the car dealers, but also any sort of
intermediary that does not add value, such as Airbnb, eBay and even the stock
exchange. The decentralised nature of blockchain also means that there is no single
point of failure. Imagine a catastrophic IT system failure at a bank or when the tsunami
hit the Land Registry in Japan. These events could destroy all records or, at the very
least, prevent access to them for several days. This is because there is a single point of
failure. Tutor There are also wider uses of blockchain. Imagine the application for a
public company or a government’s accounts. Blockchain records every transaction they
enter into in real time, visible to everyone instantly. No possibility of mistake, fraud or
manipulation. There’s no waiting for the year end to publish the accounts. Blockchain
also makes use of a clever mechanic called hashing. Hashing transforms an Blockchain 5
©The University of Law unlimited amount of data into a 256 character string. The data
could be a single letter, a bank ledger or the entire contents of the internet. They can all
be represented by a 256 character string. It can also be used to verify the contents of a
document or ledger, because changing anything would change the hash it generates. So
if you know what the hash should be you can instantly spot any changes from the
original. A 256 character string is easy to send, receive and verify, and it massively
reduces the amount of data being transferred and processed. Tutor The hashing
technology is what allows the blocks of blockchain to be built, and it’s how blockchain
got its name. The entire current state of, say, Bitcoin can be hashed into a 256 character
code, who owns which coin, when they were transferred, all the history, everything, in
256 characters. And this creates a block. The next time a change is made it uses the hash
from the previous block, adds the changes and creates a new hash, a new block. Each
block is built on the last and previous blocks cannot be changed. Bitcoin is the most
famous example of blockchain and it uses a permissionless system, which means
anyone can join and no one has special permissions or different access levels. Users are
all equal. You can create permissioned networks where different access rights can be
granted and only selected individuals or companies can join. Permission blockchain
networks are usually of more interest to law firms. Tutor Blockchain 6 ©The University
of Law However, there is one major problem with blockchain systems. It can only
process around six transactions per second. They are working on this and efforts are
being made to speed it up, but this low transaction rate would be a major problem for
high volume transactions, like Visa payments, the stock exchange or other financial
transactions which would require tens of thousands of transactions per second. This is
probably the only reason blockchain hasn’t made a huge impact on the world so far. So
let’s talk about costs as well. The people storing the decentralised ledger incur
electricity costs, even though they’re quite small. Bitcoin, for example, rewards people
who mine and they give them new Bitcoins, but really all that’s happening here is that
users are rewarded for their support of the decentralised network. Payment is easy
when you’re dealing with money as money is moving around and fees are so low that it
isn’t an issue. But there are cases where the intermediary uses advertising to pay its
costs and users do not usually pay money at all. Things like social media, for example.
Getting users to pay even a tiny fee when they want to update social media would be
quite a challenging thing. Tutor Blockchain is a technology that allows a lot of
innovations. It has several key features. Creates trust. Strangers can trust each other
without needing a third party to verify their identity. Reliable. Decentralised, encrypted
and using hashing technology it is extremely robust. Speed. Blockchain can conclude in
minutes what it would previously take days to do. And cost. Removing middlemen
reduces the cost of a huge number of transactions. Blockchain 7 ©The University of Law