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Showing posts from August, 2017

The end of lawyers..?

 No. Lawyers are going to be around just as they have been for the next 50 or 100 years or more. The daily working life of most lawyers will change, and for some considerably. Some aspects of lawyers jobs will disappear, and some roles in law firms too. Repetitive tasks such as document analysis, or taking clients through standardised processes will become increasingly automated. I don’t think they’ll be missed. For just as the autopilot on an aircraft is used for the routine flying of the plane its still the pilot that handles take-offs and most landings. The autopilot removes avoidable repetitive workload and lets them concentrate on bigger things. This seems to me a good analogy for how Lawyers and intelligent agents, such as bots, algorithms etc will be used in law firms. Lawyers will usually be the first point of contact for clients once they have decided to use a particular lawyer or firm and get the client underway taking instructions. The AI will then assist with

The power of Pre-Suasion

 Behavioural economists have for some time known that how an offer is framed can give widely different response rates amongst test groups. But Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky took this further as described in Daniel’s book Thinking Fast and Slow ‘Amos and I once rigged a wheel of fortune. It was marked from 0 to 100, but we had it built so that it would stop only at 10 or 65 One of us would stand in front of a small group, spin the wheel, and ask them to write down the number on which the wheel stopped, which of course was either 10 or 65. We then asked them two questions: Is the percentage of African nations among UN members larger or smaller than the number you just wrote? What is your best guess of the percentage of African nations in the UN? The spin of a wheel of fortune had nothing to do with the question and should have had no influence over the answer, but it did. “The average estimate of those who saw 10 and 65 were 25% and 45 respectively.” Con

Legal revolution

This is a bold statement but one that we at LawPanel are confident to make. Why so? Software is eating the world. Mobile devices are eating PCs and laptops. How people access information and knowledge services is changing fundamentally. As will how law firms deliver their services, by whom and by what, and pricing models. Before starting LawPanel I founded and ran for 7 years the UK’s leading online trade mark legal service, www.trademarkdirect.co.uk. Most of the software we used was developed by Thomas and his team. So we’ve not just followed the developments in technology and service delivery but used them to make our legal services firm the best at what it does. During this time its become clear, as SciFi novelist William Gibson observed ‘ The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed’. Already firms like Trade Mark Direct are using complex algorithms (US patented) to automate repetitive tasks such as initial trade mark clearance searches. This not o