LawHack: Improving Access to Justice, Using Technology

Waiting for the hackathon to begin

A couple of weeks ago I took part in the Tech4Justice Hackathon, organised by the Law Society of Scotland. The aim of the weekend was to bring together people from different backgrounds to think about ways in which technology could be used to improve access to justice.

The Problem

Many people still access legal advice in much the same way as they would have 20 years ago. The only thing that’s changed is the use of Google and email instead of the Yellow Pages and a telephone.

The process involves frantic searching to try and contact as many firms as possible that might be able to help with your particular issue and wait for some of them to reply. Then, you have to hope that you can afford their hourly rate (usually charged in 6 minute intervals). All this before anyone has given you any advice.

The reality is that consumers generally only think about access to legal services when some life event occurs. In these situations, they normally have little knowledge of the situation they are in and need advice. But when they try to get advice, they discover that they have to break out the wallet first.

What we’re left with is a situation where the customer is left holding all of the uncertainty and risk. Very cushy for the law firms, not so cushy for the consumer. This in-balance in any market drives a want for innovation from one side, but a fear of it from the other.

The Solution

There are already a number of startups attempting to address this in-balance. One example is QuickLegal, a startup that lets people have a video chat with a legal expert. The first 15 minutes is free and customers can pay for more advice after that. You can even get fixed price quotes for certain legal services.

This commoditisation of legal services has many law firms worried, and indeed this happens in any industry when innovation challenges the status-quo (just look at the effect Tesla is having in the automative industry).

When charging based on an hourly/daily rate, if a law firm can provide a service quicker, it makes less on providing that service. However, the commoditisation of legal services encourages a move towards value-based pricing — the price of providing a service is based on the perceived benefit by the consumer, rather than the actual cost of providing the service.

This change in pricing model encourages law firms to be more efficient. If they can provide a service quicker, they make more on providing that service.

LawChat

Over the course of the weekend, the team I was in built LawChat, a bot built on top of Facebook Messenger for accessing legal advice.

We wanted to think about how we could reduce the friction involved in accessing legal advice. The idea behind LawChat is that it could provide basic advice at any time of day or night, even helping users to complete basic tasks like filling out forms. In more complex cases, LawChat could also help hand users over to reputable law firms who could provide further advice and assistance. LawChat in turn would make a commission from law firms for referring that user to them. The user would provide a review for the law firm after receiving advice, which would be used to rank the results shown to other users.

By building LawChat on top of Facebook’s Messenger platform, it meant that we could bypass having to build and host a user interface for LawChat. This has the obvious saving in terms of time we didn’t have to spend building it, but it also meant that users don’t have to learn another user interface. They just interact with LawChat in the same way they interact with many of their friends — by chatting to it through Facebook Messenger.

To start talking to LawChat, a user just has to find the LawChat page on Facebook and click “message” — they don’t even have to like the page. No sign up or app install is required and the user can get basic advice in seconds. This ability to provide value quickly means that users are much more likely to engage with the service.

Teams working hard on their concepts

Future

Overall the weekend was a great success, with LawChat picking up the award for most disruptive idea. While we have no immediate plans to pursue our idea further, the law industry is at a point where there are many opportunities to innovate and disrupt and I would definitely take part in any similar events in the future.

I also will be thinking more about the part bots can play in any of the concepts I am currently working on. The ability to engage users quickly on a platform they already know how to use, while removing the need to build a user interface is very appealing and I’ll be watching the bot space very closely from now on.