Legal-Apps-Article-AI
How will AI and legal apps disrupt the legal market?
The lawtech industry is growing rapidly in the UK with an expanding range of ‘unregulated’ services available to consider as an alternative to instructing a firm of solicitors to handle certain processes.
Unregulated in the context of this article means unregulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. However, many of the new products do have a regulator whether that be the CLC (Council for Licensed Conveyancers) or The Society of Will Writers. It is always wise to check out the regulatory status for services but undoubtedly many will exist with no regulation at all. This may surprise some readers unfamiliar with the legal industry but in reality, anyone can call themselves a lawyer, but you cannot call yourself a solicitor or Legal Executive unless you are fully qualified and insured. However, there are some areas of law, including litigation and probate which are named ‘Reserved Activities’ and cannot be performed by anyone other than a fully qualified solicitor.
This set of rules is not well understood by consumers and is at risk of being undermined by external forces as technology advances. As an example, around 2 million people per year are caught up in a court claim, often in the small claims track (under 10k) and unable to seek legal representation due to the inability to recover any costs. This has created an advice desert which forces people to seek online advice on how to defend a court claim without a lawyer. Litigation is a reserved activity, so there is genuine ambiguity on how far an unregulated service can take down the litigation route. Common sense would dictate that so long as the consumer remains a Litigant in Person (self representing) then the rules on reserved activities will not be breached.
In the last year ChatGPT and other AI tools have exploded onto the market. Clients of mine have started using ChatGPT for advice and drafting support with their law cases. This surprised me because quite often the AI analysis response was of high quality and the technology was particularly good at processing large volumes of communications and identifying where inconsistency or flaws existed or providing accurate tone analysis.
However, despite these initial positive results, inevitably some advice/analysis will be inaccurate or unhelpful to the consumer who is unfamiliar with litigation or the law. The problem with this will be that the consumer will be unable to differentiate and may blindly trust the AI outputs. There have already been several reported cases featuring AI impacting legal cases and there is little detailed planning on how to provide support to consumers relying on such technologies.
Moving on to Legal Apps however, there seems to be far greater ownership and accountability from these providers. The potential of these ‘apps’ could be highly disruptive to the regulated market, especially if effective at handling conveyancing and marital matters, both of which are strongly represented in the legal apps market.
In September 2024, LegalBeagles launched a new area of the forum to showcase the complete range of legal apps available to consumers. Currently we have apps covering divorce, conveyancing, template letters and wills. These products are growing strongly and there is a clear need to place them altogether in a dedicated space to observe and learn from their emergence into the legal market.
Over the last fifteen years, the access to justice gap has widened and high street law firms have reduced their presence in the market. The corporate B2B sector is thriving but the B2C law sector is in trouble as it is difficult to adapt full-service representation to become cost effective or affordable.
Apps offer a managed journey through a specific legal problem – consumers can access these services wholly online and pay only a fraction of the cost of the equivalent process handled by a regulated firm. Naturally, this could come with risks, but so far, the signs are positive that these services are successfully filling a gap in the market, harnessing digital processes to fulfil an urgent need for more cost-effective routes to handling a legal process.
The LegalBeagles Legal Apps page is a great place to research the various services currently and we will add new services as they launch to ensure we have the most accurate Beagle eye view of their impact on the legal market. Even better, our page offers these new app companies an excellent way to reach their target customers as we currently have 3.6 million visitors to the LegalBeagles forum annually.
