Registers of Scotland today announced that they were closing Meadowbank House, in Edinburgh and St Vincent Plaza, in Glasgow from today. As a consequence, the application record to register title to land in Scotland has been suspended until further notice as they will be unable to process any paper applications after today. This step was…
Artificial Lawyer this morning posted an article entitled: ‘It’s hard to combine venture capital with professional services’ – Atrium Co-Founder, Augie Rakow The premise taken by Artificial Lawyer from an interview with Augie Rakow was that Atrium didn’t work out because of this combination. Artificial Lawyer observes that:- scaling up a law firm from scratch…
On Tuesday (3 March 2020) Tech Crunch broke the news that Atrium, the Californian based hybrid legal software and law firm, was shutting down. Tech Crunch said this was “after failing to figure out how to deliver better efficiency than a traditional law firm”. Atrium has now laid off all its employees, which totaled just…
Artificial Lawyer has asked the question What If…Big Law Pulled The Plug On Legal Innovation? This is perhaps a hypothetical question (I don’t think any Big Law firm will be willing to admit they are no longer innovating even if they are not) but it apparently arose because:- In the last few weeks we have…
Hot on the heels of Gartner predicting that by 2023 “Lawbots” will handle a quarter of internal legal requests and referencing a Divorce Bot that actually (unbeknown to them) only ‘lived’ for 3 days, they have now recommended businesses move to test and adopt smart contracts and blockchain. They have stated:- The impact of blockchain smart…
This past week reading a couple of articles on the internet and visiting a museum made me think a lot about the future of jobs in law and whether or not robots would be replacing us. I have, of course, previously visited this question and in particular the seven deadly sins that can be committed…
Last week Atrium, the Californian law firm / legal tech company dedicated to serving the needs of startups, announced it was pairing back its law firm operation by laying off an unspecified number of lawyers (although it would appear to be most of them) and pivoting to their next phase of growth. They will apparently:-…
On 16 October I attended the 2019 Legal Geek Conference in Shoreditch, London. This was the fourth Legal Geek London Conference and my second. I attended last year’s event: The One where Reality overtook Hype. The day started with long queues:- The Conference had already started by the time me and many others reached the…
Last year I went to the Source Conference by Symphony Legal to play a board game. This year I flew in from Cyprus to play with lego. That’s how the first day of the conference ended so we will come to that later. The MC was comedian Celia Delaney who told us the day was…
The Law Society of Scotland have not done very well in recent times with their legal technology initiatives. I remember fondly the days of their Nothing but the Net Conferences when they ran well informed legal technology events. That was more than a decade ago. Ten plus years later and they are foundering with initiatives…
Next month Clio are holding two Innovate Legal evenings in Scotland of discussion, technology and networking. First in Glasgow (8th October 2019 at The Studio, 67 Hope Street) and then in Edinburgh (10th October 2019 at Atria One, 144 Morrison Street). I have been invited to talk at both. The aim of these Innovate Legal…
My last blog post resulted in a legal journalist threatening me with legal action for doing nothing more than republishing their own public tweet on the topic I was blogging about. It seemed extraordinary for a legal journalist to be seeking to suppress freedom of expression by a legal blogger. I thought it might be…
