The latest report from the Legal Innovation Lab Wales; ‘The LegalTech Ecosystem in Wales, Between Start-Ups, Law Firms and Law Schools: A Road Map for the Future’, offers a comprehensive analysis of the sector, with a view to a bright future, with Wales as a global leader in LegalTech.

Following on from Inception and Mid-Term Evaluations, completed in 2020 and 2022, a Final Evaluation was undertaken by SQW Ltd., to thoroughly analyse the project and its results. The main findings of the Report, were split into Conclusions and Recommendations, as follows.

A look back at the successes of Legal Innovation Lab Wales through our WEFO funding period

Exploring the importance of engagement, collaboration and networking and the positive impact it can have on research outcomes.

The My Journey App launch event, held on the 28th of Feb 2023, discussed a very important but often overlooked topic of the digital exclusion of offenders and celebrated the creation of an application that helps prison leavers to rehabilitate into society.

This blog takes you through the accessibility considerations when designing an application.

Allen & Overy recently announced that they are integrating innovative AI programme, Harvey, into everyday practice at the firm after testing it in beta since November 2022. This is a significant leap for the legal sector which is often accused of being slow on the uptake of technology, but could the patchwork of legislation and regulatory requirements around AI prevent such innovations being used to their full potential?

The evolution of neurotechnology has the potential to be hugely beneficial, especially in a health or medical context. However, there are numerous moral and ethical considerations, not only in the legal field which need to be addressed as neurotech continues to advance and become more prevalent in society. Read more here…

Whilst Artificial Intelligence may be integral to the future of legal practice, it appears there is still a lot of human work that needs to be done in the meantime to help get us there. Read on to see our insight into Open Justice.

Recently Robo-lawyers are making headlines in the papers with DoNotPay’s AI lawyer being the first in history to assist a defendant in court. Read about how trust is a key factor in the progression and uptake of this new legal development.

Our workshop series, ‘’Innovative Lawyers’’, took place over 7 weeks, in the summer of 2022. Its curriculum, designed in collaboration with the Cardiff LawTech group of the Law Society, featured sessions on a wide range of technologies relevant to the legal sector, exploring their foundations and applications.

Advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have made it possible to automate the task of text summarisation, thus making identifying key information without losing the essence of the text a far quicker and more efficient process.

In this event, which is all about change and innovation, legal professionals from all around the world came together to listen to how representatives from big law firms as well as in-house counsels have adapted to this rapidly changing LegalTech landscape.

In continuation of the Lab’s work earlier this year at our Legal Hackathon Wales and in line with the Welsh Government’s ongoing programme to improve accessibility of legislation, we created a prototype chatbot for the Science Festival, to be used to answer questions about the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016.

A recent webinar on The Future of AI and Ethics in LawTech, organized by Barclays, delved into this question in the context of ethical problems posed by AI in the legal sector. Our blog summarisies discussions at this interesting event.

Under the pressure of immense fines, social media platforms are obliged to keep their websites free of any potentially harmful content. To this end, they employ artificial intelligence algorithms that both recognise and remove content deemed as such, and often completely prevent it from being uploaded. This blog summarises the fascinating panel discussion by our CYTREC colleagues on this topic.

Sam Wheeler from Big Lemon, spoke about very relevant aspects of networking. In particular, she highlighted the need for a strong connection between humans and technology as we move into the ‘future of work’. Our reliance on tech will emphasise the need to be constantly adapting and refreshing our skills.

The event was centred on accessibility of legislation, calling participants to brainstorm and prototype solutions to facilitate understanding and interaction with Welsh law.

In this blog we illustrate the hackathon challenge from one of the teams, who chose to workshop ways to make legislation more accessible and understandable for the general public.