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This article titled “How far can legal work be automated?” was written by Neil Rose, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 2nd November 2011 14.52 UTC
Many lawyers abhor the idea that what they do can be boiled down into a process that can be commoditised and systematised. It is not the same as selling a tin of baked beans, to use the common refrain, and the way the market is developing will be to the detriment of clients.
Not everyone agrees. While there are some aspects of legal work that will always need the personal touch – unless you want to be represented in court by your mobile phone – there is no reason to think the law will be insulated from the inexorable advance of the internet and the disruptive impact it is having on every aspect of life.
Many people still want the reassurance of face-to-face advice: I have recently been trying to do an agreement online but found it raised so many questions that I needed help with that I’m now looking for a solicitor to draft the thing for me.
But will the next generation, brought up on being able to access pretty much everything they want online, feel the same? Leading legal “futurist” Professor Richard Susskind predicts that the way legal services are delivered will move from a one-to-one model to a one-to-many as technology develops.
As a first step, all the research shows, unsurprisingly, that the web is playing an ever-increasing role in how consumers find a lawyer. A recent survey by Peppermint Technology found that nearly a quarter of people would turn to the web, second only to (but still well behind) personal recommendation – a recommendation they may well get through a social media network such as Twitter.
As I blogged recently, most of the online services have focused on a wide range of dynamic legal forms that are filled out by the user, with the option of having them reviewed by a lawyer afterwards. But last week I was given a tour of what could be the next stage in online law, a website called Road Traffic Representation (RTR).
Painstakingly developed over three years by solicitor Martin Langan – who says he is “wedded to automating what you can” – it provides people charged with motoring offences with a free online diagnosis of their case and an idea of the likely penalty, with ultimately the option of electronically booking and briefing a barrister to represent them at court.
The aim is to replicate the process a solicitor would go through when considering a motoring offence, but much quicker and at no cost by getting the “client” to enter all their details into the system. “You’re not paying for the process – just the bit you value,” Langan explains.
To me that is one of the central changes coming to the legal market: stripping down what lawyers do to focus on the part where the application of all that training and knowledge is vital for the client.
As well as the option of instructing a barrister from £399 for a plea in mitigation – organised by Old Bailey Chambers in London – users can also seek telephone advice for £35 per call. There are additional fixed-fee services, such as template letters.
Nicholas Bull, a barrister at Old Bailey Chambers who has been heavily involved in the project, describes RTR as “a pretty impressive piece of kit – we put a lot of time and effort into road-testing it”. Tellingly, he continues: “It’s made me realise how simple the information is that we actually require. [The site] has distilled a series of steps to get that information. As a barrister I am better prepared than if a solicitor calls up with an instruction because the website asks the right questions.”
Langan compares RTR to insurance websites which have cut out brokers. The ultimate question is whether his system can deliver as good a result as taking time off from work to go and consult a solicitor face to face. The more immediate one, however, is whether people will think it can. He admits his main concern is whether the system is ahead of its time. “Are people ready for it?” he asks. “Will people trust their case to the computer? That is why the telephone service is there.”
It is a valid concern, the curse of the first mover. But whatever the fears of the traditionalists, and however justified they may be, I suspect he won’t be alone in offering this kind of service for very long.
Neil Rose is the editor of legalfutures.co.uk
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Lawyers beware: your clients are rebelling
Three years ago, when we began setting up the Legal Ombudsman, our first press release talked of the new service as helping to resolve disputes between lawyers and their customers. The Guardian’s Marcel Berlins immediately took me to task for my solecism: people who use the services of lawyers are clients, he said, and to refer to them as customers was an unforgivable error.
But the choice of words had been a deliberate symbol of the change which our arrival signalled. The term “client” embodies the traditional view of the relationship between lawyers and those they represent: one of unequal power and status. For every client there is a patron, someone of higher rank who offers help and protection in return for future favours: Julius Caesar, a successful lawyer long before he was a successful general, built his political career on his network of grateful clients whom he had helped in the notoriously combative courts of the late Roman republic.
But the notion of customer turns this relationship on its head. In most businesses, customer is king. It is the customer who has the power, who can pick and choose what services to buy and from what provider. In a normal free market, it would be the lawyers who compete for patronage, rather than bestow it.
But those are not the traditions of the law and, protected by their social status, political power and deliberately obfuscatory language, lawyers have hitherto been able to ignore the notion of customer service. But the bulwarks of legal tradition are crumbling as the market changes, and lawyers are being forced to face the possibility that their habitual view of how they go about their daily work may have to go a fundamental change. Those who adapt to the market, it appears, will survive; those who cannot may be doomed to disappear.
Nowhere is the battle between the traditional view of client and customer more marked than in the notion of pricing. It is this collision between what lawyers are used to providing and what the modern users of professional services are
increasingly accustomed to expect which is at the root of the 100,000 contacts from disgruntled customers we receive every year and no fewer than one quarter of these, by far the largest element of our workload, are about cost.
Take an obvious example of the sort of thing we see. People going to see a solicitor may be told that it is not possible to put a price on what the service may cost but the lawyer will charge, say, £201 per hour plus VAT, with fees and disbursements (there’s that legal language again) being extra. Even for someone familiar with the law, that provides almost no useful information about how much they can expect to pay and little or what options they have to keep costs down. An hourly pricing rate with no cap allows the lawyer to determine what work they deem necessary to carry out and makes it almost impossible for the customer to challenge the eventual size of the bill. Nor does it provide any useful information which allows a customer to compare the cost of one lawyer with another.
When challenged about this sort of practice, lawyers will argue that the trajectory of many legal transactions is impossible to predict – cases can be quick and relatively low-cost or they can be prolonged and extremely complex, requiring contested court hearings with all the associated expense. Indeed, while lawyers are increasingly bowing to consumer expectations by offering estimates of how much the service might cost, they do not regard those as in any way binding: we have seen estimates of £5,000 translate into final bills of ten times that amount. And where both sides in a piece of litigation are working on an hourly-rate model, the temptation to string the matter out by engaging in unnecessarily combative or complex correspondence sometimes appears to be overwhelming.
Of course there is some truth in their argument (lawyers rarely advance arguments entirely without some element of truth). Litigation can be very unpredictable and costs can vary hugely. But that is only true of a relatively small proportion of legal services. Writing a will, buying or selling a home, even conducting a simple criminal case – all of these activities are in most cases entirely predictable transactions where costs can be calculated well in advance. Even where more complex transactions are involved, it is often possible to predict what each element of the service may cost and offer some sort of conditional pricing dependent upon how the case unfolds.
And that is exactly where the leaders of the legal services market are going. We are already seeing the arrival of new, nakedly commercial enterprises offering fixed price wills or conveyancing, breaking those transactions down into discrete elements many of which can be provided by relatively unqualified (low-cost) staff supported by specialist legal software. The involvement of large insurers in funding personal injury or employment claims has led to a far more acute understanding of the likely cost of simpler litigation. Law firms who seem incapable of working on a fixed costs model for individual clients appear far more willing to do so for insurers and the Legal Services Commission.
And as the legal services marked continues to change, with the arrival of commercial giants such as the Co-op and the increasing cross-selling of financial, legal and other services by banks and insurers, it is the lawyers who show that they can adapt their traditional view of clients and put customers at the heart of their business who stand the best chance of prospering. There are risks in that new market: no one wants pile ‘em high and flog ‘em cheap law, particularly not when our children, our homes or our freedom are at stake. But if it means cheaper, more predictable pricing, one of the key barriers between citizens and legal services will be removed.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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