In 1984, a non-profit was established in Sacramento, California, by a group of scientists to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (called SETI). I could not help comparing this with my experience of working with law firms, where there is often an expectation of almost immediate results from any marketing communications initiative. My heart sinks every time I hear “Oh, we didn’t get anything from that initiative, so we will not do that again”. This betrays a misunderstanding of the effort that is often required to break into a new market, win a major client or develop a profitable source of referrals.

The word ‘chatbot’ has been appearing with increased frequency in Legal Futures stories over the past year. As a popular human interface for computer software backed by artificial intelligence (AI), it is a phenomenon we are likely to see yet more of. The combination of ‘chat’ – an essentially human activity – and ‘robot’ neatly encapsulates this interface. Other names for the technology are chatterbot and artificial conversational entity. And the application of chatbots in the law appears to be growing.

It might be a New Year with a new justice secretary, but there’s work to do if 2018 isn’t going to result in the same old story when it comes to legal reform. In recent times the personal injury sector has been hit by a battery of changes, and all-too often our response has been unclear or even apologetic. Yet the cumulative impact on our firms and especially on those we seek to assist has been obvious. It is time we learned from our experiences and tried a different approach.

Independent regulation gives confidence to consumers, providers, investors and society as a whole that legal services work in the public interest and support the rule of law. The Legal Services Act 2007 does not require all approved regulators to be structurally separate from representative bodies. Instead, the Legal Services Board is required by the Act to produce internal governance rules (IGR) which apply the principle of regulatory independence in legal service regulation. We are currently running a consultation on the IGR which continues until 9 February.

In December 2017, the Information Commissioner’s Office (reported that data security incidents between April and June 2017 had increased by 15% compared to the previous year. This is nothing new – data breaches have been on the rise for years. Yet law firms are often more concerned about protecting sensitive information from external threats than from a far more likely cause: human error. Human error was behind the forwarding of confidential plans from The Bank of England to The Guardian. The sender included the wrong recipient in the email and, ever since, autocomplete has been disabled and staff at the UK’s main financial regulator must now enter every single address manually.