and in many cases the fixed costs will be significantly lower than the costs incurred ‘on the clock’. The question is: who will pay the shortfall? Will the winning litigant be asked by their lawyers to make up the shortfall from their damages or will the lawyers swallow the difference? It seems reasonable to assume that clients will increasingly expect their lawyers to confine their costs to the recoverable fixed costs and then ‘cut their cloth’ accordingly. This means lawyers, who currently have an incentive to spend as much time on a case as possible in order to maximise their revenue, will now have the opposite incentive: to be as efficient as possible. In a recent article, Master of the Rolls Sir Geoffrey Vos wrote of how AI can smooth the pathways for online users and, when used along with traditional early legal advice, can prevent vulnerable users falling through the cracks in what is now an exceedingly complex system. Clearly, he states, AI will not replace lawyers anytime soon, not least due to the need for individuals to receive human advice and explanations, but nonetheless, it will be vital in saving lawyers’ time and clients’ money. With these new incentives, it seems likely that firms will have little other choice than to ultimately harness the efficiency that many of these new technologies can provide. How Have Personal Injury Lawyers Been Adapting to Fixed Costs Regimes? Personal Injury lawyers who have been operating in claims worth under £25,000 are used to this and have been adapting their processes for more than 10 years to operate in fixed costs regimes. 40 LAWYER MONTHLY AUGUST 2023 Technology has already played a key role in helping the PI sector adapt to these changes and become more efficient in meeting its clients’ needs. Law firms use technology to triage claims for liability and value and have begun to provide a digital route for clients to commence claims. Significant improvements to case management technology have been introduced, which in every instance are being used to speed up the process and to enable lawyers to become more efficient. What Changes Can We Expect? The personal injury market has had 10 years to adapt to these changes, and to a degree it has done so using technology. Yet it cannot be denied that in the last year alone, the pace in advancement of technology has given way to much more enthusiasm and excitement within law about what might be possible. For example, see Sir Geoffrey Vos’s other comments recently about judges being replaced by robots. Yet there is something that cannot also be denied – the legal sector is adapting technology slowly, or more slowly than others. A study published this week by the University of Manchester found that legal professionals are still ‘sitting on the fence’ when it comes to embracing new technologies. The report suggests that a lack of understanding and encouragement from management is proving to be a barrier to the uptake of technologies, ranging from ones with the potential to improve the efficiency of service delivery, such as the use of legal databases, automation of document assembly, online portals, virtual assistants and contract review software, to advanced chatbots and the latest advances in artificial intelligence. The survey found less than a third of solicitors use legal tech daily, which
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