New frontiers in the metaverse

Recent legal tech conversations have focused on innovation post-Covid. There is, of course, plenty of scope for innovation but the argument that innovation needs to be central to future legal services assumes that (most) existing approaches are misguided. This brings to mind Professor Richard Susskind’s comment: ‘It’s hard to tell a roomful of millionaires that they’ve got their business model wrong.’

The latest law firm financial results published by the Gazette (tinyurl.com/yy7whm4e) show increases in revenue and profitability across the board. However, even successful firms need to track changes in the business environment to secure their market position and avoid a Kodak moment. Firms need a strategy for managing and directing innovation in a remote and hybrid world.

In virtual person

London Tech Week included several discussions about the opportunities and challenges of the metaverse. The Big Innovation Centre hosted a discussion in the House of Lords, showcasing innovative initiatives that combined virtual and online worlds. For example, creating fashion in the metaverse means that most development work on a line of clothing can be done virtually, without wasting material on multiple prototypes. When people order items from virtual shops, these can be manufactured on demand, again reducing wastage. Companies started exploring virtual reality (VR) to expedite onboarding and add an experiential element to remote collaboration before the pandemic. This has gained traction in the last two years.

The Managing Partners Forum knowledge and innovation group discussed the place of innovation – both in terms of where people are located, because brainstorming remotely can be challenging, and strategically within the structure of a firm. Rick Seabrook of consultancy Panoram Digital mentioned Accenture’s enterprise metaverse, The Nth Floor, which was launched in summer 2021. The Nth Floor is accessible via Oculus (VR) headsets and also via desktops, as Oculus requires a Facebook account and headset, which not all employees have. Accenture bought 60,000 headsets for employees who wanted to try the immersive VR experience.

The Nth Floor supports the onboarding experience, giving new hires a virtual tour of the workplace, and enabling them to meet in the metaverse to learn about Accenture and its culture. This blended onboarding concept is not new. Johnson & Johnson carried out a study on virtual onboarding and training in 2019, before the pandemic hit, and since 2020 it has become more prevalent. Hewlett Packard Enterprise also uses VR for collaboration. Virtual worlds are not above the law, so law firms too are opening parallel offices in the metaverse, with German firm Gleiss Lutz following Washington-based ArentFox Schiff into Decentraland last week. Singapore’s annual TechLaw Festival is happening simultaneously in the metaverse.

When it comes to fostering innovation, Ian Jeffery, former chief executive of City law firm Lewis Silkin and the Law Society’s incoming CEO, emphasised the importance of balancing virtual and physical collaboration. Lewis Silkin’s advertising agency clients helped the firm think more imaginatively about creative spaces. Jeffery commented that collaborative tools offered by the likes of Microsoft 365, Miro, Remo, Slack and Trello ‘worked fantastically well during the pandemic but are limited when it comes to fostering… the culture and trust that makes people want to experiment and take risks’. Ultimately, he added, the key to innovation is change. ‘You have to get people committed to the notion of change, and brilliant as the tools are, they only go so far.’ Convincing everyone to commit to change is a big ask, however. Perhaps this is why many law firms have delineated innovation spaces and increasingly separate innovation ventures, the latest being Norton Rose Fulbright’s LX Studio, the new innovation brand from NRF Transform, and Cleary X from Cleary Gottlieb.

Competitive compatibility

This week the government introduced the Data Protection and Digital Innovation Bill, which proposes new rules about the use of artificial intelligence around reliability, transparency, explainability and human liability/responsibility (tinyurl.com/y5zuy968). But because legal AI needs to be trained on relevant, up-to-date data, the principle of competitive compatibility (comcom) underpins any tech platform that uses AI to expedite legal services and support decision-making.  

In an article for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Malaika Fraley and Karen Gullo (tinyurl.com/53ank5yv) discuss the challenges for start-ups around comcom. ‘Many big tech companies used comcom when they were first starting out, but now that they are entrenched, powerful companies, they don’t want to make it easy for anyone to build on what they have. When they were upstarts, the products and services of big firms were fair game. Now that they’re entrenched, they don’t want upstarts challenging their dominance. We need comcom to make better and more innovative products for tech users.’

They have a point. Comcom underpins UI and UX for legal tech too because it is easier for lawyers to work with platforms and applications that ‘talk to each other’. But not everything that is published online is ‘fair game’ and use of legal data and databases is subject to licensing and regulation.

Open justice and innovation

Here in the UK, the National Archives’ Find Case Law service enables court data to be accessed, reused and exploited commercially under an Open Justice Licence. ‘The Find Case Law service ensures the availability of essential justice data, levels the playing field for data users, and protects the proper administration of justice,’ says John Sheridan, digital director at the National Archives. That protection means there are exclusions, which include sharing and processing personal data, and using court data for computational analysis – i.e. for training AI software. ‘If you wanted to use the data from the Find Case Law service to train algorithms, you could not do that under the Open Justice Licence (because of the exclusion around computational analysis). This is to protect the proper administration of justice in a fast-moving field. Instead you have to apply for a free, transactional licence,’ he explains. So here in the UK, it is possible to access publicly available data and use it to compile a search engine index or train algorithms, but only with an additional transactional licence. This ensures that the data is being used appropriately and for an approved purpose. Additionally, the Find Case Law service includes an application programming interface which opens up the data for even more potential innovation opportunities – and facilitates comcom.

On the interface between innovation and regulation, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has been working with initiatives such as LawtechUK to encourage innovation that opens up access to legal services and expedites the work of its member firms. I joined an SRA Innovate panel in Brighton moderated by Benedict Fisher, director of communications at the SRA; Ben Darby, managing partner at Darby & Darby Solicitors in Torquay; Bhavisa Patel, head of legal tech solutions at Eversheds Sutherland; and Guy Stern, founder of legal tech start-up Legal Connection, a mobile practice management and communication tool for lawyers.

'The Find Case Law service ensures the availability of essential justice data, levels the playing field for data users, and protects the proper administration of justice'

John Sheridan, National Archives

The gap between legal tech start-ups and their potential clients was flagged up early in the discussion. While Stern regularly faces the difficulty of law firms continually asking him to tweak his product to fit their specific preferences, Darby is building a bespoke system for his firm in partnership with the University of Exeter because he could not find one that matched his firm’s requirements. While he understood that it can be simpler not to involve detail-driven lawyers in the development process, it was essential to involve them in testing prototypes. ‘We need to keep lawyers in the innovation loop,’ he added. ‘The University of Exeter LLB includes law tech, so tech-enabled lawyers are on their way!’ Patel agreed. ‘You need a good mix of people who understand how we provide legal services to our clients, and techies who understand the art of the possible. By bringing together those skillsets, we can home in on the challenges.’

Patel noted: ‘The biggest challenge (apart from the billable hour) is change management: to get people to commit time so that we can understand their problem areas, and once we’ve delivered something, to keep people engaged.’ Adoption is a perennial problem. Patel’s innovation strategy includes finding out why people are not using new technology solutions and keeping the feedback loop open in order tackle barriers to engagement.