On law.com: DoNotPay Slapped With California Class Action for Unlawful Practice of Law
“DoNotPay is merely a website with a repository of – unfortunately, substandard – legal documents that at best fills in a legal adlib based on information input by customers,” the complaint says.
In the Law Gazette: Britcoin is not as bonkers as it sounds
Many Gazette readers will have reacted with bewilderment to headlines about the government’s plan for a ‘digital pound’ – inevitably dubbed ‘Britcoin’. Aren’t pounds nearly all digital, anyway? And what chancellor in their right mind would want to put an already rickety UK economy at the mercy of crypto booms and busts?
On SRA: Risk Outlook report: cryptocurrencies and other distributed ledger technologies
All types of businesses are utilising new technologies all the time and the legal sector is no exception. While not every firm will be at the forefront of use and development for a whole host of reasons, some technologies might be unavoidable as they become the standard for the industry. This Risk Outlook report focuses on distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), such as blockchain-based cryptocurrencies and their implications for legal services providers.
By Jordan Furlong : Law has a magic wand now
Some people think Large Language Models will transform the practice of law. I think it’s bigger than that.
On Pluralistic (by Cory Doctorow) : Flickr to copyleft trolls: drop dead
Today’s a big day for users of Creative Commons images: Flickr has declared zero tolerance for copyleft trolls, predators who exploit a bug in out-of-date versions of the CC licenses in order to threaten good-faith users of CC images who make minor errors in the way they credit the images.
The 1-2-3 of the web on the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers.
Image: Ethereum Classic Wallpaper – Art Watching – CC0 Public Domain.
]]>In 2007 I joined Delia Venables editing the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, launching the Newsletter online on infolaw. A regular contributor at the time was Alex Heshmaty, writing accessible articles about technologies. Together we have, since then, covered most topics that explain the workings of the internet – the basics, the issues, the technologies and the applications – as it affects lawyers, and these articles are all now gathered together in a virtual publication inevitably entitled The Internet for Lawyers.
]]>Read on the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers.
Image: “Furggelen afterglow” by Lukas Schlagenhauf (cropped) is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
]]>We don’t not need to understand what happens under the bonnet of our car to be a good driver, but we do need a good understanding of our car’s functions and how they work together. So too with the internet, we should know how it works at a “user level”.
I’ve written several pieces In the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers setting out the basics:
Originally posted 14 December 2020; updated 28 March 2021.
]]>FutureLearn provide structured online learning courses in partnership with hundreds of universities and other bodies. These cover all subject areas and range from short courses, through professional accreditation programmes, to university degrees.
Courses are divided into “weeks” of prescribed activities. You can learn by watching videos, listening to audio and reading articles. Many of these steps are followed by short quizzes to help you check that you have understood.
They may be started at any time after they are published (and can be done to any timescale) and are free to access for their duration plus 14 days, regardless of when joined. Continuing access and other facilities are available on upgrade to a paid subscription.
In the Law subject area, there are currently two courses which should appeal to Newsletter readers and may well be useful in completing this year’s CPD/competence requirements.
AI for Legal Professionals (I): Law and Policy (4 weeks of 3 hours per week) is produced by Mark Shope, an Assistant Professor of Law at the National Chiao Tung University School of Law in Hsinchu, Taiwan. It explores the legal and policy issues surrounding the development and application of artificial intelligence. Topics include:
The Modern Judiciary: Who They Are, What They Do and Why it Matters (5 weeks of 3 hours per week) is produced by King’s College London, with the Judiciary of England and Wales, and presented by James Lee, an academic at The Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College. It explores the role of judges in the UK and informs about the daily business of judging, from common law to judicial diversity, and is divided into topics as follows:
In this article for The Practice from Harvard Law School, Richard Susskind considers the impact of Covid-19 on our courts. He outlines the challenges that our justice systems currently face and suggests we need a new mind set if we are to tackle these successfully. He then introduces the various types of remote courts that have been deployed during the crisis and summarise what has been achieved so far and what lessons we have learned. He then explores other aspects of online courts and concludes by recommending how courts should plan for the future.
This is very much a necessary follow-up “chapter” to his book Online Courts and the Future of Justice. in light of the rapid transformation necessitated by the restrictions and limitations to pre-existing practice imposed by Covid-19.
LawtechUK is a collaborative initiative between Tech Nation, the government-backed Lawtech Delivery Panel and the Ministry of Justice, to support the digital transformation of the UK legal sector. It will focus on increasing awareness and understanding of lawtech and fostering transformative innovation for the legal sector. Its work programme will include a government-backed Lawtech Sandbox for innovative R&D, and the development of new platforms, toolkits and online training.
It does not at present have its own website, requiring navigation within the Tech Nation site at https://technation.io/lawtechuk. But there’s a Twitter feed @LawtechUK to keep you up to date and a YouTube channel, hosting some worthy debates.
]]>The House of Lords Select Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies has produced an important Report which focuses on a crisis “with roots that extend far deeper, and are likely to last far longer than Covid-19.” This virus, that affects us all, is the pandemic of misinformation and disinformation. “If allowed to flourish these counterfeit truths will result in the collapse of public trust, and without trust democracy as we know it will simply decline into irrelevance.”
Alex Walker of the UCL Constitution Unit provides a useful a summary of the main issues and recommendations contained in the report. The committee has recommendations, inter alia, on fact-checking, digital imprints, libraries of online political advertising, and promotion of digital literacy.
In Case C-311/18 Data Protection Commissioner v Facebook Ireland and Maximillian Schrems (aka Schrems II), the CJEU has declared the Privacy Shield invalid.
In an initial statement, the ICO states that “the CJEU has confirmed how EU standards of data protection must travel with the data when it goes overseas, which means this judgment has wider implications than just the invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield. It is a judgment that confirms the importance of safeguards for personal data transferred out of the UK.” They point to the FAQs of the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) on the invalidation of the Privacy Shield and the implications for the Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs).
Hogan Lovells provides a useful backgrounder to the case and initial analysis and advice for what companies should do now.
The fifth edition of the now well-established leading work has just been published. Fully entitled Information Rights: A Practitioner’s Guide to Data Protection, Freedom of Information and other Information Rights, it covers the topic comprehensively and methodically in 51 chapters.
The second volume comprises extensive annotated statutory material, including the DPA 2018, the GDPR, FoIA, subordinate legislation, international conventions and statutory guidance.
Hart Publishing, June 2020, 2208 pages, £200.
Newsletter contributor Kelsey Farish has a great blog which she dubs “a lawyer’s musings on fashion, media, and digital culture”. Recently she has published a very useful overview (in two parts) of nine common offences people commit on social media, including copyright or trade mark infringement, defamation and harassment, and privacy and data protection concerns.
If you read that heading quickly, you may well have blanked out the “accessible”, but that’s precisely what this Guide from the Government Digital Service (GDS) is all about.
“Accessible social media campaigns can be more effective because they can be accessed and understood by the widest possible audience – regardless of whether people have a visual, hearing, speech, motor, cognitive or other combination of impairments.
“Inaccessible social media campaigns risk alienating our audience, reducing our impact and breaching key legislation … Accessibility should be built in from the start – it’s the right thing to do and will help your campaigns reach more of the people you need to.”
The guide outlines the key steps content producers can take to create social media campaigns that meet the standards of accessibility required from government communicators. But it is applicable to all concerned to meet similar standards.
Kira Systems has published a graphic explainer on How AI Accelerates the Legal Contract Drafting Process. “AI closes the gaps in previous contract drafting software. It offers attorneys the tools to draft contracts, and organize and revise existing data more efficiently, and mitigates the risk of future contract disputes.”
The Ministry of Justice has issued Guidance on making wills using video-conferencing. The new rules temporarily permit wills to be witnessed via video link with a clear line of sight.
HMLR’s Annual Report includes a section Digitally refocussed, describing how their digital transformation will focus on receiving verified digital data from customers in order to facilitate frictionless conveyancing.
This first appeared in the Internet Newsletter For Lawyers July 2020.
]]>See You Out of Court at buzzsprout.com/815344 is a new podcast focusing on new ways to resolve disputes without burning vast amounts of money through the courts. The podcast will inform you of all the options to resolve disputes without going to court, whether mediation, arbitration, adjudication, ombudsmen schemes and, importantly, by the parties themselves.
One theme throughout will be how technology is designing and offering more effective, practical, speedier less costly and therefore more accessible ways to resolve disputes and in this way to experience justice.
Each podcast will feature new developments with interviews with experts in the field. It will be of interest to mediators, arbitrators, lawyers, any organisation such as insurance companies or others who deal with claims and disputes and of course the general public.
See You Out Of Court is produced by Graham Ross, a lawyer and mediator who has been heavily involved in technology developments in ADR and ODR for over 20 years.
Graham has also set up a new panel of mediators at SeeYouOutOfCourt.com.
In November 1999 Simmons and Simmons launched elexica.com, intended as “a gateway to the firm’s expertise for clients and law students, as well as a forum for the whole of the legal profession to discuss relevant issues in law” (my words at the time).
Elexica won plaudits and major awards, standing out in the early days as a model of how a large firm could showcase its expertise to clients.
In 2006 elexica was integrated into the Simmons and Simmons website and in 2007 Editor Mary Loosemore wrote for us in the Newsletter about the benefits:
“Back in 1999 we wanted to move into online services with a slightly different approach from that taken by other firms. We wanted to send out a message that we were forward thinking, not afraid of technology and able to work in an innovative way.
Technology and the market have changed significantly since then [and] elexica has evolved as the vehicle for getting our know how to clients and contacts. …
As a result of these developments, Simmons & Simmons’ online offering is now more streamlined, giving clients and key contacts a seamless experience however they choose to consume our expertise.”
And so it remained for 13 years.
Then, in October 2019, Simmons and Simmons’ Twitter account excitedly tweeted, “Notice something different? We’ve been busy working with the best creative talent at [developers] to refresh our brand. Check it out: https://simmons-simmons.com #simmons #law #design”.
So I did.
I looked for elexica … it had gone! There are no direct references to the former brand or its microsite. Traces do remain as there are internal links on the site to former elexica resources and these redirect to the equivalent pages on the integrated site. However, though a Google search for site:elexica.com lists 17,800 pages still in its index, all the links bar the default web address give a “404” on simmons-simmons.com – “Sorry, the page you are looking for can’t currently be found.”
Despite my enquiries, I’ve not had an explanation.
What a sad end to a once great site.
Not far behind elexica in the early web days was Out-Law.com from Pinsent Masons, launched in May 2000 to provide useful information to organisations and to showcase the expertise of Pinsent Masons.
Although no longer hosted at its own domain, Out-Law is still very much a fundamental aspect of Pinsent Masons’ web presence. Out-Law publishes over 2,000 legal news stories each year and maintains a few hundred legal guides.
Google still lists 26,500 pages at site:out-law.com but these all seem to redirect nicely to their new locations at https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law.
This year’s Law Via the Internet conference will be held on 15 and 16 September in London, hosted jointly by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, and BAILII and will focus on Legal Information and Access to Justice.
The Law Via the Internet conferences are organised under the auspices of the Free Access to Law Movement (FALM), a consortium of institutions dedicated to providing free and open access to law around the world.
Further information will be posted in due course at https://ials.sas.ac.uk/law-internet.
Online divorce is one of the key services being developed by HMCTS. It aims to deliver “a national end-to-end digital service for individuals and/or their legal representatives to make an application to legally end a marriage or civil partnership and resolve associated financial issues.”
The first stage for personal applications launched in April 2018. This enabled people to apply for an uncontested divorce, upload evidence and pay online. Since then more than 70,000 people have applied online, with 45,000 applying in 2019. More than 8 out of 10 users say they were satisfied or very satisfied with the service.
There is clear information and guidance on the whole process at www.gov.uk/divorce. HMCTS estimate it takes half the time to complete the online process as it did the old paper forms. Less than 1 per cent of online applications have been returned because of errors, compared to 40 per cent under the old system.
During 2019, acknowledgement of service and decree nisi applications were added to the online service and decree absolute digital applications were also released, completing the digital end-to-end service for unrepresented petitioners.
New scanning technology means that any paperwork sent in connection with online applications will be placed on the digital court file automatically.
Following successful piloting, all legal professionals are also now able to use the divorce online process, progressing through to decree absolute, on behalf of their clients. They can manage their accounts and view the progress of their client applications on a single dashboard.
In late 2019 consent order pilot testing began with 124 solicitor participants, and the end-to-end digital journey was put in place, with applications reviewed by 16 participating judges.
Solicitors receive automatic email notifications on key events and all orders are available to download.
Online divorce service amicable.io does things differently. It exists “to help separating couples part ways on amicable terms, without spending thousands of pounds on lawyers.”
Couples complete a series of intuitive online forms and questions to reach agreement; their amicable “coach” writes up the agreement; and amicable’s legally trained specialists complete all the final paperwork.
The High Court was recently asked to rule on whether this model presented a conflict of interest. Mr Justice Mostyn gave a declaration that it did not and also went on to find that amicables’s role in preparing and submitting divorce documents did not amount to the conduct of litigation, nor did he believe the drafts which amicable helped prepare were within the scope of reserved legal instruments.
He concluded by saying that, “The declarations made in this case relate only to amicable. Other online divorce facilitators (and there are many) can only rely on them if their business models are virtually indistinguishable from amicable’s.”
See JK v MK [2020] EWFC 2.
Prof David Hodgson provides a detailed analysis of this judgment on LexisNexis Family Law:
“This is an important judgment for the benefit of online service providers and for the legal profession, as well as ancillary professionals such as mediators. …
It will be for each organisation to ensure that their business model follows that approved by the court and that they do not breach either of the specific requirements. It will be a boost for the leading online service providers such as amicable providing affordable, yet high quality drafting and other family law services.”
This first appeared in the Internet Newsletter For Lawyers January 2020.
]]>In the last issue of Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, I reviewed Richard Susskind’s Online Courts and the Future of Justice:
]]>Four years on and Professor Richard Susskind has written the same book he wrote last time, so he says. He jests, yet again. The message and the underlying arguments remain constant; the same analogies are deployed (you know, the drill); but tech has moved on, more is feasible and the vision is developed and refined accordingly.
In its Report to the Civil Justice Council in February 2015, Online Dispute Resolution for Low Value Civil Claims, the ODR Advisory Group, chaired by Prof Richard Susskind recommended the establishment by HMCTS of an online court for low value civil claims, called HM Online Court (HMOC). This would overcome the fact that current practice and procedures were “too costly, too slow, and too complex, especially for litigants in person.”
This court service would be in three “tiers”. The first, “online evaluation”, would help users identify their problem, be aware of their rights and obligations and understand the options available to them.
Next, “online facilitation” would involve online mediation and negotiation, supported, where necessary, by telephone conferencing. Some “automated negotiation” might be involved.
If not resolved by mediation, “online judges” would decide suitable cases or parts of cases largely on the basis of papers submitted to them electronically, again supported, where necessary, by telephone conferencing.
Although its terms of reference were restricted to civil claims under the value of £25,000, it suggested that the jurisdiction of HMOC “should also be extended to suitable family disputes and to appropriate cases that come before today’s tribunals.”
My recent article in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers looks at how this has panned out.
]]>12 March 2019 marked the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal envisioning a unifying structure for linking information across different computers using hypertext, which by 1991 had been developed and became known as the World Wide Web. The day was marked by three celebratory events around the world, all attended by Tim: at CERN in Switzerland, at the Science Museum in London, and in Lagos, Nigeria.
The first event at CERN was a series of three discussions with leading players in the development of the web.
The first discussion was amongst early developers. With TBL were:
They were joined by Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, and a leading commentator and analyst on the state of the web.
TBL then engaged in conversation with Bruno Giussani, the Global Curator of the TED conferences, on how to fix the web before flying off to London for the second event.
The final discussion at CERN continued looking at the problems the web faces.
The full video of the event (at 2 hr 27 min) is worth watching by anyone concerned with understanding the web, its current challenges and how they might be addressed.
]]>My article in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers January 2018 issue:
The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, and others advocated that the underlying code for the web should be made open – publicly available on a royalty-free basis, forever. His employer, CERN, concurred and announced this in April 1993, thus sparking a global wave of creativity, collaboration and innovation on a scale not seen before.
The revolutionary ideas that drove the early web included:
These ideas gave rise to new approaches in diverse fields, including Open Data, Open Government, Open Access and Free Culture.
Although the term “open web” is frequently used, it appears that it is nowhere succinctly defined. Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation refers to it as “a sweeping term – it encompasses technical concepts like open-source code and open standards. It also encompasses democratic concepts like free expression and digital inclusion. But there’s a single underlying principle connecting all these ideas: An open web is a web by and for all its users, not select gatekeepers or governments.”
]]>I wrote this for the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers November 2018 issue:
Blogging is a simple, cheap, efficient, effective way to publish and update time-sensitive information, particularly in constantly-changing fields such as the law. Blogging puts in your hands publishing power even greater than that which was the preserve of only large, established publishers with fat wallets not so long ago. Content management, feed generation, subscriber management, search engine optimisation: all is built in for free. That’s reason enough for almost everyone and every organisation to consider blogging.
Blogs are not just a publishing format, but a networking tool, a means to reach out and engage with an audience; and blogging is not just about publishing, but about conversing and contributing. That’s how blogs started out – with the desire to share thoughts and “write out loud”.
Image: cc by Amy Gahran on Flickr.
]]>In November’s Legal Web Watch I look at three recent developments with access to justice tech:
Image: Justice cc by sa OpenDemocracy on Flickr.
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