Legal engineering will help deliver efficiencies for law firms

Online hackathon winner points the way to digital solutions for lawyers and consumers.

Legal engineering will help law firms and in-house teams become more efficient and enable them to provide services differently, according to the winner of the first 24-hour online courts hackathon.

Wavelength, which describes itself as ‘a regulated law firm of legal engineers’, said the combination of legal knowledge and technological know-how allows it to create solutions that improve business processes.

‘Anybody who’s looking at the efficiency of getting something done in a legal environment, or to create entirely new types of legal services, are going to need legal engineers,’ co-founder Drew Winlaw told Solicitors Journal.

Winlaw and his colleagues, together with the Law Society, used legal engineering to create CoLin (Courts OnLine), a digital assistant for housing claims which won the online courts hackathon last weekend (2 July 2017).

The invention used ‘pathfinder’ technology and voice interaction to help users through each stage of a claim against a landlord. Information is harvested from a chat with the CoLin app using Amazon’s personal assistant, Alexa.

A tenant in private rented accommodation suffering from damp, for instance, could file a claim that this was the likely cause of their daughter’s chest infection. All the parent would need to do, CoLin’s designers said, would be to talk to the app using its voice-assisted functionality, which would help pre-populate a letter that could be sent to the landlord. CoLin would also suggest providing additional information, such as a picture of the damp.

‘People only needed a basic awareness that there might be an issue and a smart phone,’ said Winlaw. ‘The benefit of that from an access perspective is that if you live a distance from where these services are provided or can’t get to an advice centre during opening times, then they can be accessed digitally.’

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