Tech Nation, December 8, 2020 3 min read
LawtechUK, the government-backed initiative within Tech Nation to help transform the UK legal sector through technology, has today announced the five applicants that have been selected to join the first group of participants of the Lawtech Sandbox R&D initiative.
Launching in pilot, the Lawtech Sandbox has been designed to fast track transformative ideas, products and services that address the legal needs of businesses and society. It provides pioneers with access to a number of tools and services, to accelerate the development of game-changing lawtech, including access to useful legal datasets and a fast-response forum of eleven cross-sector regulators. The Lawtech Sandbox Pilot will run for three months from December.
Jenifer Swallow LawtechUK Director at Tech Nation, comments: “The Lawtech Sandbox is designed to accelerate digital transformation of the legal sector by providing targeted support to those who are building game-changing lawtech, working alongside them to help raise the bar for business and society. Access to data, cross-sector regulator engagement, and timely input from decision-makers represent shared barriers to growth, all of which we address through the Lawtech Sandbox.
We are delighted to move forward with five fantastic Lawtech Sandbox applicants, to support not only their development, but the wider sector and beyond, through what we establish and learn during this pilot. We thank and encourage all who applied and congratulate the cohort of five as they move into onboarding. We look forward now to the collaboration and work ahead, alongside our great bench of participating regulators, Lawtech Sandbox partners, and Steering Board.”
The five Lawtech Sandbox Pilot projects were chosen through a selection process with the Lawtech Sandbox Steering Board, from 65 applications received. The organisations chosen to join are transforming the way in which consumers and businesses interact with legal matters. Each is tackling key challenges within the legal sector.
The pilot pioneers will have access to a number of tailored tools and services, including: access to regulators for advice, support and assurance to help navigate regulations and governance issues; connections to LawtechUK’s legal, business and public body network to help drive commercial opportunities and collaboration; advice from applied ethics experts in the design and development of lawtech products; and access to legal data to by matchmaking with data sources, with dataset needs further factored into later phases of the Lawtech Sandbox development.
Amplifi helps customers engage with and assess lengthy, technical legal information by presenting information in a way that fits a customer’s needs and enables their understanding. They achieve this by using natural language processing to identify common elements of legal documents and use machine learning to assess the degree of likely comprehension, involving a cognitive risk score.
The Lawtech Sandbox Pilot will support Amplifi to get answers to its emerging legal, regulatory and ethical questions and help source datasets of technical or complex customer-facing legal documents to enable them to develop, test and further calibrate their approach.
Peter Hunn, founder of Clause and the Accord Project, aims to provide an open-source library of machine-readable legal documents and file transformation technologies that can act as a foundation for business and future development. Legal documents are typically formed of unstructured text, which makes it difficult to analyse and use the data they contain. This causes inefficiencies, costs and revenue issues for organisations and means they miss out on a range of benefits.
The Lawtech Sandbox Pilot will support in building out the beginnings of the library, working with the Lawtech Sandbox network partners on establishing use cases for this technology, as well as facilitating engagement with public bodies and industry.
ClauseMatch looks to transform regulation into digital, machine-readable form with an easy-to-use, AI-powered smart document collaboration platform, making it easier for businesses to automate and manage their compliance and to keep up with regulations.
The Lawtech Sandbox Pilot will connect ClauseMatch to regulators through the Regulatory Response Unit, to explore and progress digitisation of the regulatory framework, as well as facilitating access to materials such as impact assessments and risk taxonomies, to further develop their AI.
Deep Tech Dispute Resolution Lab
The Deep Tech Dispute Resolution Lab is developing a dispute and risk avoidance tool based on advanced machine learning techniques. The tool sorts and analyses a range of data within organisations to automatically detect early warning signs of an emerging dispute or issue with customers, suppliers and/or others.
Through its network, the Lawtech Sandbox will support the Deep Tech Dispute Resolution Lab to work with in-house teams and secure access to organisational data to further test and train their product, and develop a commercialisation plan.
Legal Utopia makes legal services affordable and accessible, particularly focused on the SME market, by providing recommendations and information on legal services via an intelligent legal diagnostic process that can identify and assess a wide range of legal problems. They aim to make it easier for small businesses to review and understand a range of common legal documents instantly and without legalese.
The Lawtech Sandbox Pilot will help Legal Utopia get expert advice and data input, to realise its wider data-driven development objectives, whilst obtaining multi-regulator input to support new services and tools.
The Lawtech Sandbox Pilot will run for three months from December, and will be delivered in collaboration with 11 participating regulators, Lawtech Sandbox partners, and a cross sector Steering Board.
