CILEx Regulation
Design thinking, lawtech and the role of regulation
Felix Brown examines the potential of emerging technologies in the legal sector and reffects on their recently held ‘design sprint’ for the conveyancing sector.
About the author: Felix Brown is policy and research o›cer for technology and innovation at CILEx Regulation.The legal sector has changed. Whether that be in terms of serving a customer or client, working in a court or firm, or operating from home or in the offce. Factors beyond our control have transformed the ways in which services are now being delivered.
What is perhaps more remarkable is that, despite these changes, the practice of law has been able to continue to be delivered with a relative degree of normality. It is important to acknowledge that this has not been achieved due to drastic overnight advancements in technological offerings, but by adapting and utilising what was already available and applying it (albeit out of necessity) to the existing legal landscape.
However, the technologies embraced by the legal sector to maintain this degree of normality represent a drop in the ocean of what is available to the sector. If these current COVID-era practices represent a major first step in what is possible for tech-enabled legal services delivery, then the potential of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) should be considered the next.
Present use of tech in the sector
AI-enabled products are already available to supplement working practices across the sector. Legal analytics applications can be used to crunch case-law data in order to offer insights and trends into a particular practice area, while document automation can provide useful suggestions atop preset templates to speed up form-filling procedures. Furthermore, due diligence checks can be performed much more quickly while considering a far broader range of information, and predictive technologies can even attempt to forecast litigation outcomes.
There are numerous other examples, serving each and every segment of the sector. However, despite a more general acceptance of technologically enabled working practices developing in the wake of the pandemic, a lack of trust and conÿdence in emerging technologies is hindering wider uptake.
This cautiousness arises from uncertainty, both in terms of risk and regulatory compliance. Fragmented regulatory regimes do not help in this respect; truly novel technologies do not fit into the cookie-cutter moulds of ‘law’ or ‘finance’, nor do they respect the distinction between ‘Chartered Legal Executive’ or ‘solicitor’. As such, to make best use of these developments and inject some certainty into the uptake of technology, there is role to be played by regulators. The purpose of this would not be to prescribe the use of technology in the profession, but to identify the pain points where benefit has outweighed risk and incentivise and encourage development in those areas that most benefit the profession and the consumer.
Design Sprint Event
In pursuit of this, CILEx Regulation convened a single-day design sprint workshop at the beginning of September 2020. This sought to utilise principles of design thinking in order to explore the opportunities that AI and data hold for the conveyancing sector. The event centred around the following question: ‘How might AI/ data be better used to reduce risk exposure to third parties and open up the conveyancing market to a broader range of legal services firms?’
The leading subject of conveyancing was chosen for this project for a number of reasons:
- Conveyancing generates significant amounts of data; however, this is often filed physically or stored in a format unreadable by AI.
- There are many in the sector actively seeking change, including public bodies such as HM Land Registry (HMLR). As such, while there is significant impetus to improve the speed and accessibility of the process, multiple stakeholders interacting in myriad different ways means it is often difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of delays.
- The multidisciplinary nature of the conveyancing process means that technological offerings are susceptible to falling between regulatory regimes. By uniting organisations from across the process, it was anticipated that these gaps could be identified using principles of design thinking.
Focusing on ideas that reduce risk and uncertainty may help to open up the conveyancing market to a wider range of firms.
Reflection and next steps
The sprint represented a collaborative effort between CILEx Regulation and the experienced team of academics behind the Next Generation Professional Services Firms (NextGen PSF) project. The purpose was to convene a forum whereby stakeholders to the industry could come together to discuss and direct their efforts toward a tangible output. To this end, we worked with the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Council for Licensed Conveyancers in order to assemble a multidisciplinary group of participants, including LawTech experts, conveyancing firms, CILEx specialist advisers, lenders, industry bodies, HMLR and others. The event, designed from the ground up by NextGen PSF to be delivered online in a single day, allowed the group to identify problematic areas in the conveyancing process and develop conceptual solutions.