News focus: LawtechUK - £2m next phase to focus on unmet legal need

In the shadow of this week’s Budget statement the government announced the LawtechUK programme will continue, under new management. But its focus will shift away from Big LawTechnology was one of the few give-away sectors in chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s lacklustre budget on Wednesday. As part of the government’s ambition for the UK to become a science and technology superpower, Hunt announced a new ‘Manchester Prize’ – £1m a year to be awarded for the next 10 years to researchers in artificial intelligence. Over the same period the government will invest £2.5bn in the more speculative field of quantum computing.

Budget day also saw a more low-key technology announcement. Just a month behind schedule – not bad, for a central government procurement – the Ministry of Justice announced the successful bidders for the £3m contract to run the next phase of the LawtechUK programme.

A change in contractor had been on the cards since last summer, when the initiative, launched in 2019, was awarded £4m for a second phase beginning on 1 April. However, procurement did not formally begin until November.

A sense of urgency was added when the programme’s existing host, and employer of LawtechUK’s handful of full-time staff, the London-based incubator Tech Nation, announced that it was closing following the ending of its main government contract. The winner of that work, Barclays Eagle Labs, declined to bid for the LawtechUK element.

In the end, the names of the new LawtechUK contractors came as a surprise, despite them being well known in the technology startup scene. The programme’s next phase will be run by a partnership between an Edinburgh-based tech incubator, CodeBase, and the global network and events organiser Legal Geek.

'We truly believe that LawtechUK will have a significant impact on the future of the legal sector, and we feel privileged to be leading the charge in this endeavour'

Stephen Coleman, CodeBase

Announcing the contracts, justice minister Mike Freer MP said: ‘The UK is a world leader in delivering legal services and expertise, and our ongoing investment in new technologies will make sure we are continuing to lead the way in advances and new ways of working. CodeBase and Legal Geek bring a wealth of experience and knowledge of LawtechUK that will nurture new, cutting-edge innovation.’

CodeBase, which opened in Edinburgh in 2014, claims to be the UK’s largest tech incubator, with a record of helping hundreds of startups grow and scale up.

Stephen Coleman, its chief executive, said: ‘We truly believe that LawtechUK will have a significant impact on the future of the legal sector, and we feel privileged to be leading the charge in this endeavour.’

Legal Geek, founded in 2015, describes itself as a global community of legal professionals and lawtech enthusiasts dedicated to promoting innovation and technology in the legal industry. Rules for its flagship conference include ‘Dress comfortably (please, please, no ties)’ and ‘Look after your fellow law-gends, you may need their help someday’.

Beth Fellner, director of Legal Geek, said: ‘We will be working in partnership with CodeBase to deliver a transformational programme of activity that will engage, inspire and educate. Legal Geek will ensure LawtechUK develops the legal sector nationwide, equipping organisations of all sizes with the culture, expertise and confidence to innovate.’

The new ownership coincides with an important shift in emphasis for the programme. LawtechUK was set up in 2019 to help transform ‘the UK legal sector’ rather than justice in a wider sense. Its initiatives include a digital ‘sandbox’ to test innovations in a safe environment alongside legal regulators and work on online dispute resolution and smart legal contracts. It also works with the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce to promote the use of English law to govern innovations such as crypto assets.

Although helping to grow the legal sector’s economic contribution is still part of LawtechUK’s specifications, the next phase of the programme will focus less on ‘Big Law’ and more on filling the justice gap faced by ordinary citizens and small businesses. This is in line with the widespread perception that the vast majority of the billions invested in lawtech over the past decade have gone into systems designed to help already wealthy firms and ‘challenger’ providers, such as consultancies, make more money from City clients. Legal futurologist Professor Richard Susskind has calculated that, of the 3,000 to 4,000 lawtech startups he has found worldwide, only a quarter are trying to change the whole model of delivering legal services.

The hope is that innovators will flock to test ideas about opening up access to justice within LawtechUK’s sandbox, which is to continue under the new management. The extent to which its role will overlap with, or be subsumed into, the ‘multi-regulator sandbox for AI’ proposed by Sir Patrick Vallance’s Pro-Innovation Regulation of Technologies Review, which was also published alongside the budget, remains to be seen.