Technology

The president of the Family Division has cleared the way for more remote hearings, including those where parents and children appear as witnesses, by revising the guidance for judges.

A start-up created by an ex-City lawyer to help lawyers and clients visualise complex legal structures and transactions is in a new funding round having already raised £2m.

People should not presume that remote hearings cannot be used for cases where the credibility of witnesses is at stake, the IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice has said.

Lawtech products may need to be directly regulated as they become more complex, and it is harder for lawyers to understand how the underlying algorithms work, new research has suggested.

Law firms are “performing admirably” in response to daily cybersecurity threats, but are still being successfully compromised, research has found.

Businesswoman Gina Miller has turned to the “outdated” wills legislation in her latest campaign, calling for emergency measures to help people make wills during the Covid-19 crisis.

Remote hearings have been a successful emergency measure but should not be taken as establishing a settled mode of operation for the family courts after Covid-19, a leading judge has warned.

Weightmans has become the first law firm to secure Bridging for Innovators funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council, which will help it develop a legal redaction tool.

An online dispute resolution platform for SMEs and a ‘lawtech sandbox’ were unveiled today as cornerstones of a concerted push to develop digital legal services in the UK.

Legal technology education is focused too much on ‘hot topics’ like machine learning and blockchain, making it “disjointed and ad hoc” in character, a paper for the Legal Services Board has argued.

The physical presence in a sensitive family case of leading counsel shielding from Covid-19 was desirable but “not essential”, a High Court judge has ruled in ordering an in-person hearing.

The Lord Chief Justice has said there will be “no going back” to pre-pandemic days for the courts in their use of technology, predicting a permanent change in the way lawyers operated.

Three law firms based in the UK, USA and Singapore, have invested $10m in a collaboration platform launched this week. Lupl aims to be the world’s first “open industry platform for legal matters”.

A High Court judge has been forced to issue a written ruling because his voice was “breaking up” at the end of a telephone hearing with a litigant in person and the law firm suing her for fees.

Children are “coming in and out of the room” during remote family law hearings and in some cases witnessing their “distressed” parents, a major study has found.