PYLG Newsletter

Winter 2018

Merry Christmas!
This edition will provide you with details of our last event – Halloween Cocktails, along with our
next – the much anticipated Christmas Party! We also have a guest article on the increasing
importance of A.I in legal work, along with a piece on LawWorks, and what you can do to help
the local community . Read on for more...

Halloween Cocktails
Our spookiest event of the year took place at ‘Puzzles?’,
with young lawyers from 5 different firms attending.

A costume competition was won by Nick McCarthy of

Hegarty LLP Solicitors, arriving a rather fantastic Donald
Trump (pictured).

Thank you to all who braved the cold night for attending
Save the Date! and to ‘Puzzles?’ for hosting us.

The PYLG in conjunction with the Peterborough Young

Professionals would like to invite you to our 2018
Christmas Party. Join us on Thursday 13th December
at 6pm in the Function Room at The Brewery Tap.

This will be a great opportunity to allow local young

professionals to meet and socialise in a relaxed festive
setting. To book your place, please contact Sarah
Lidgett (selidgett@greenwoodsgrm.co.uk) by Thursday
6th December.

THE COMMITTEE:
Alex: alex.hartnoll@hegarty.co.uk
Amir: amir.choudhary@buckles-law.co.uk
Amelia: Aoconnor@regencychambers.co.uk
Emily: Emily.malvaso@buckles-law.co.uk
James: James.Steward@hcsolicitors.co.uk
Jonathan: jpmumby@greenwoodsgrm.co.uk
Melissa: Melissa.casey@spw-law.co.uk
Rebecca: rjrudge@greenwoodsgrm.co.uk
Roxanne: Roxanne.Dean@taylor-rose.co.uk
Sarah: selidgett@greenwoodsgrm.co.uk
Shamsher: ssingh@greenwoodsgrm.co.uk
Umrah: Umrah.Mirza@Taylor-Rose.co.uk

If you are interested in joining the committee, please email any of us for more details.
Opportunities to help with LawWorks
LawWorks’ Legal Advice Clinic is
looking for volunteers
LawWorks needs local volunteer solicitors in Peterborough to
help launch a new free legal advice clinic. Working in partnership
with the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Women’s
Consortium, the clinic will offer free legal advice to vulnerable
women, including ex-offenders and victims of domestic violence
and rape.

Your advice could give someone hope at a time of crisis and open up options they
never knew existed. At the same time you will gain a greater depth of experience, a
great sense of achievement and you will prove to your employer that you are
dedicated to access to justice for all!

The timings and frequency of the clinic

will be as flexible as possible to
accommodate volunteers’ availability, so
it may be that you need only give a
couple of hours once a month to make a
difference. You do not need to be a
specialist in any particular area of law, as
we can provide training to those who
may want to expand their
knowledge/expertise.

If you would like to volunteer and make a real difference, please contact Rosie
Collingbourne, LawWorks Support & Development Officer for the East of England, at
rosie.collingbourne@lawworks.org.uk or on 07921 451625.

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Opportunities to help with LawWorks
About the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough
Women’s Consortium

The Consortium is made up of seven women-

led organisations whose service users would
greatly benefit from having access to
professional legal advice that legal aid cuts
mean they may not be able to receive
otherwise.

Being able to access this advice within a women-only venue, the Dawn Project run by
Cambridge Women’s Resources Centre in Peterborough, means they are in a safe and
supported environment.

http://www.cwrc.org.uk/

About LawWorks

LawWorks (the Solicitors Pro Bono Group) is a charity committed to enabling access
to justice through free legal advice. We encourage, facilitate, support and celebrate
the contribution of pro bono (by solicitors, law schools, law students and others)
across England and Wales.
LawWorks supports a growing
network of over 230
independent pro bono clinics
across England and Wales,
working with local community
organisations to reach those
people who are most vulnerable
and least able to access advice.

https://www.lawworks.org.uk/

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Featured Article
Each issue of our newsletter contains a guest article. This edition of the PYLG newsletter features
Lennox Desborough of Hegarty LLP Solicitors, covering the future of the legal professional in the
age of A.I. Read on...

Robo Law: How Advancing Many international firms have already taken
Technology Could Impact the the plunge in introducing A.I and innovative
technology into their everyday practice.
Future of the Legal Profession.
Take the IBM Watson enhanced RAVN system
for example which automatically reads,
Advanced technology and Artificial
summarises and even interprets key
Intelligence has increasingly become the
information from contracts and key
topic of much attention in recent years
documentation in minutes as opposed to
with predictions of driverless cars,
often hours spent by solicitors reviewing and
healthcare robots and autonomous
analysing the same data with the added
armed forces peering their heads around
factor of human error. Time and attention
the steadily approaching corner.
can therefore be spent more efficiently with
greater focus given to tasks of larger
Recent findings estimate, rather
substantiality.
gloomily, that by 2030 40% of all jobs in
the US will be replaced by A.I, with
similar figures for the UK. The common
perception has long been that the most
at risk jobs are largely focused around
the manufacturing and retail industry;
with machines taking the place of
humans on production lines and
supermarket checkouts.

Professional Risk
As technology rapidly improves and
machines become more intelligent (even
learning on their own accord) other
professions traditionally established on
human logic and rationality could face
robotic adaptation. This includes doctors,
journalists, taxi drivers and legal
professionals.
Alongside such developments within
traditional law firms the so called ‘Legal
Tech’ industry has also begun to gain
increasing prominence with new digital
start-up companies now offering legal
services directly. This occurs not via the
advice and advocacy of trained solicitors but
through the algorithmic design of advanced
A.I platforms.

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Featured Article

Robot Lawyers The question for the legal profession

The ‘DoNotPay’ app is one such platform.
Dubbed as ‘the world’s first robot lawyer’
it was set up by a university student
initially to contest parking fines but after
successfully appealing over 375,000 fines
in its first two years the IOS downloadable
app now tackles consumer rights claims,
tenancy disputes and even asylum
applications without any solicitor
involvement. Use of the platform is also
completely free of charge and can be
conducted via a smartphone.
The appeal from a client viewpoint is
obvious given such services can offer
them legal assistance as required but with
a significant reduction in both overall
legal fees and time spent engaging with
solicitors. From an Access to Justice
perspective this could in many ways be
perceived as hugely positive particularly
given the detrimental impact legal aid
cuts and rising fees have been reported to
have had in this respect.
nevertheless is whether the influx of
technology can have a positive and
collaborative impact in developing a more
concise and efficient practice overall or in the
contrary whether it dilutes an age old
researched and rational based profession to
one of mere calculations and algorithms.
Perhaps the answer lies with whichever
version of a technological future you
envisage, either one of utopian or dystopian
potentiality. Still, it is pertinent for young
lawyers to consider such questions and
developments now before the distant future
becomes the very real present at a speed
quicker than we can compute.

The future?
With plans afoot to expand the online
court system furthermore over the
coming years such technology could also
assist in ensuring that claims issued online
via litigants in person are both legitimate
and filed correctly; potentially reducing
the ever expanding court backlog.

If you would like to contribute to the newsletter please do contact a member of the committee.