Lawyers have been reluctant to engage with artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology partly because law firm partners haven't given junior staff enough time to learn how it can help them, according to a government-backed report. Funded by government agency Innovate UK, the report found widespread agreement among mainly banking and finance specialists from six large commercial firms that technology was increasingly important but that they were in the dark over what worked best. Focusing on the behavioural science questions of what motivates and inhibits lawyers' choices, legal transaction platform Legatics worked closely over two years with partners at Herbert Smith Freehills, DLA Piper and others, along with some 100 lawyers from Pinsent Masons, Osborne Clarke, Reed Smith and Eversheds Sutherland. Key findings were that 95% of all trainees and associates agreed on the importance of implementation and use of new legal tech, an assessment shared by three-quarters of partners. But fewer than four in 10 understood what was available, with a lack of time for learning or training and insufficient incentive to adopt it two main reasons.

AI contract review business ThoughtRiver has secured a $10m (£7.5m) investment from venture capitalists to expand its presence around the world, with extra spending in the US and South-East Asia. Octopus Ventures, which has £1.3bn under management and invests in technology innovation start-ups, pledged the Series A funding, saying it liked the company because it was disrupting a legal market that had been "slow to adopt AI" compared to other industries. ThoughtRiver was originally incubated by Cambridge law firm Taylor Vinters, which remains a shareholder in the business, and it is run by former Taylor Vinters partner Tim Pullan. The company, which has offices in Cambridge, London, New York, Singapore and New Zealand, has developed its own natural language processing engine that Mr Pullan said helped to iron out differences in the language used by lawyers to draft contracts. The product, Lexible, is used by PwC and businesses in the telecoms, retailing and technology sectors to automate the reviewing and pre-screening of contracts.

Automation in the legal profession will most probably be "a decades-long process" but artificial intelligence (AI) is redefining what it means to be a'great' lawyer. It also means that the market for legal services "will be IT-driven", according to a white paper from Swiss AI consultancy Logol. It used a sports analogy to compare the lawyer of the past to a marathon runner, who after years of training, competes in races relying solely on his muscular strength and endurance. The lawyer of the future, by contrast, "is a race car driver, who, thanks to his car, can move much faster than the marathon runner". It explained: "While physical fitness and endurance are still important characteristics of great race car drivers, pilots also need to understand and master the controls of their car in order to win the race. "The lawyer of tomorrow will no longer have to be the'fastest runner', but the'best driver'; and this will probably hold true for many decades to come." Logol said that recent developments in commercial as well as experimental applications indicated that AI would lead to "unprecedented levels of automation in the legal sector", redefining "the business scenario" and the cost of services, and providing great benefits to the consumer. "However, traditional'human' lawyers are not in danger of disappearing any time soon.

The Chancellor of the High Court has urged commercial lawyers to prepare for the disruptive impact of technology on the law, the legal system and legal profession before others "steal a march" on them. Sir Geoffrey Vos said the profession needed "to turn its incredible intellectual fire-power towards the development of the English common law, so that it can effectively tackle the problems thrown up by the use of big data, cryptoassets, on-chain smart contracts, and artificial intelligence". Expressing confidence that the English common law could adapt to these challenges, he added: "My plea is that you do not leave it too late, because there are many other brilliant lawyers in other jurisdictions who are motivated to steal a march on their common law colleagues in the UK." Giving the Commercial Bar Association's annual lecture this week, Sir Geoffrey warned commercial lawyers that it was too late to hope to retire before any of this became a reality. "It is already reality," he said. Rather, he encouraged lawyers "to think imaginatively about the world in which the commercial legal services of the future will be required".

The government has awarded grants totalling over £6.4m to 18 legal artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics projects. The projects span the whole range of legal services, from City law firm DLA Piper and private client specialists Withers to consumer forum Legal Beagles and Islington Citizens Advice Bureau. The biggest grant of £1.53m from the Next Generation Services Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund went to a project focusing on the acquisition of confidential data. The project partners include Withers, Imperial College in London, Oxford University and Genie AI. The second biggest, £1.36m, went to help develop AI software that "detects and interprets emotion and linguistics from voice" to combat insurance fraud through "credibility/vulnerability assessment".

The European Union has added its voice to the growing call for artificial intelligence (AI) to be regulated, with draft ethics guidelines that underline it must be human-centric and trustworthy to be effective. The European Commission's expert group on AI said that, to be trustworthy, the technology had both to respect fundamental rights and values and be technically reliable so it did not cause unintentional harm. The group claimed its first draft guidelines were different from other attempts to define ethical AI because they set out concrete proposals as well as broad principles. Meanwhile, the EU is due to make policy recommendations on regulating AI in May 2019. The experts said they aimed to foster "responsible competitiveness" and not stifle innovation.

Top UK law firms are ahead of their US counterparts in the use of artificial intelligence (AI), an index of legal service delivery innovation has suggested. The Legal Services Innovation Index, based on internet searches of law firm websites for indications of innovation, was devised by the College of Law at Michigan State University in the US. Academics searched the websites of firms from the Am Law 200, Global 100, and the Canadian top 30, in August 2017. They looked for mentions of innovations in 10 categories, including data analytics, AI (including'machine learning'), blockchain (including'smart contracts'), and alternative fee arrangements. In the results, by jurisdiction UK law firm websites returned 2,068 page'hits' in total for the 10 search terms, compared to 672 for the US firms and 666 for Chinese firms.

AXA Insurance has teamed up with alternative business structure rradar to launch what they call "a world first in legal and risk advice", powered by IBM Watson technology. 'Grace' is described as "a machine learning-driven app which engages businesses directly with a virtual assistant to deliver the knowledge and experience of legal and risk management experts". In a statement, the pair said the "intuitive and interactive nature of the app will bring extensive legal and risk expertise direct to business customers, helping to educate and empower them in their risk management". The rradar app will initially be available exclusively to AXA customers registered for online support through their AXA Management Liability product. They will have their legal questions answered either at the touch of a button or simply by asking'Grace' a verbal question.

In 2005, after spending some 25 years in and around the law, I set about writing down what I had learned and valued most. What emerged as of central importance in my career and for the firm I created was relationships: with colleagues, clients and indeed anyone I dealt with in the course of practice and business. Professional, working, relationships are different to personal relationships, and perhaps a little simpler in some respects, and they deserve our deliberate attention. My book was published by the American Bar Association in 2007. In 2015 I completed a second edition which has just been published, again by the ABA, in North America.

I recently made my predictions for 2017, and one was that pundits and others in the legal industry would keep talking about artificial intelligence (AI) and law. Since I want to get 100% on my predictions, again, I thought I would start the New Year by ensuring I at least got this one right. I am going to skip the usual topics when AI and law comes up: when will LawNet go live; will Arnold Schwarzenegger agree to play Chief Justice of the Future in the mash-up of Terminator and First Monday in October. Instead, I am going to focus on some questions that you do not hear discussed every day. They circle around an interesting question: are the emerging technologies, such as AI and smart contracts, about to make law more brittle?