The Bar sits firmly within the legal industry
and the legal industry at the moment isn't
meeting the latent unmet need for legal advice.
Legal advice is perceived as being too expensive
and lawyers are perceived as being unapproachable
and that has to change.
The difficulty is access to that expert legal
advice, whether you're a small business or
an individual it's either too expensive, or
the recovery of costs is not certain.
So that if you win your case, you know, being
able to get the money back that you've expended
on enforcing your rights is difficult.
People can't access legal advice at the moment
because the way in which legal advice engaged
is very difficult and that's something that
technology is very well positioned to tackle.
If you look at what the Competition and Markets
Authority have recently ordered when it comes
to banking, they've ordered that there should
be an open app so that people can use different
bank accounts within the same app.
The way that we consume all sorts of other
services, from web services for small businesses
to enforcement of intellectual property, when
you can file something online it's very natural
to most of us and we can access our bank accounts
even now through a mobile application.
You can't do that if you're trying to engage
legal services.
And that's a huge barrier, the lack of access
to it is the lack of the beginning, the origination,
there's a huge issue.
The perceived unapproachability of lawyers
and of course the price and price certainty.
