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JONATHAN AMESRachel Lindberg did not set out to bea lawyer — she describes herself as a “council-estate kid”. She is 23, originally from Middlesbrough, and was thefirst person in her family to attend higher education.Having studied law, business and economics, Lindberg was initially “more interested in business”. Then she came across Aspiring Solicitors, which provides advice to people from backgrounds that are under-represented in the legal profession. Thanks in part to the helpshe received she is now on the Legal Practice Course (LPC) at BPP University and due to start a traineeship at Hogan Lovells next February.Aspiring Solicitors provides informationabout which companies use the Contextual Recruitment System (CRS), a tool that recruiters use to take account of applicants’ different backgrounds. “It was part of the application form for Hogan Lovells. You tick the box to agree that information about your background can be put ‘in context’,” Lindberg explains. “But it’s much more than just about background. As the legal world is rapidly changing, it’s important that there isa network of support.”More than 30 legal, banking and professional services firms use the CRS. Hogan Lovells has crunched the numbers for its use of the software when hiring its annual intake of 50-60 trainees. According to Clare Harris, associate director of legal resourcing at the firm, the monitoring system includes an assurance that only information necessary to review the application in the context of socioeconomic background, and no other personal information, is shared. She adds that 94 per cent of applicants in 2016-17 opted to fill out the CRS.The tool has enabled the company to record a rise in the number of candidates it receives from disadvantaged backgrounds, something it puts down to a complementary outreach scheme. In the most recent round of hiring, 29 per cent of candidates came from such backgrounds, compared with only 13 per cent in the previous year. Of these:6 28 per cent are BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic)6 50 per cent have faced economic disadvantage6 25 per cent have faced disadvantage in personal circumstance6 25 per cent have faced an academic disadvantage6 14 per cent have two or more flags, indicating serious disadvantage.It is not only the largest firms using thetool. Penny Newman, chief people officer at Lewis Silkin, says: “We receive nearly 400 applications each year for our fourto five training contracts, and the CRS has proved a useful part of the decision-making process when 45 candidates are shortlisted for further aptitude tests and a written case study to take account of achievement and potential.” She adds that of the 16 potential trainees invited to the final assessment day, the CRS helped the firm to deduce that 30 per cent had significantly outperformed the average A-level results at their schools.Lindberg, who is gay, notes that her sexual orientation was not recorded by the CRS. While firms may needto use different systems to monitorfactors not covered by the CRS, it nevertheless appears to be a popular and powerful tool in efforts to widen access.Challenge: Jozef Maruscak, Nadia Abdul, Rebecca Agliolo and Ludwig BullFour Cambridge students behinda chatbot that helps with legalproblems are pitting their technology against real lawyers. More than 80 lawyers, from firmssuch as Berwin Leighton Paisner, Eversheds, Pinsent Masons and Clyde & Co, have signed up to take on the CaseCrunch (formerly Elexirr) software, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and a predictive algorithmto determine the outcome of legal problems. Ludwig Bull, the managing director of CaseCrunch, says: “We use powerful deep-learning architectureto make decision predictions. We train the network on a number of problems and help it to construct Man v machine: bot takes on big-hittersa model to predict outcomes of problems it hasn’t seen.”The lawyers will compete against thesystem later this month, logging on to a website to predict whether real PPI mis-selling complaints received by the financial ombudsman were upheld or rejected. The CaseCrunch teamare confident of the superiority of their technology, which they claimhas a 71 per cent accuracy rate. “It’s a competition, so we want to win — we wouldn’t do it if we thought we’d lose,” Bull says. “But it is not just about winning.It is about setting a benchmark for the performance of AI. Our goal is to get representative scores to evaluate the performance of lawyers and machines.” And even if man (and woman) beats machine, Bull insists the speed of the technology will still put it on top.The quartet behind the challenge — Bull, Rebecca Agliolo, Jozef Maruscak and Nadia Abdul — came to the attention of the legal world with the launch of the LawBot chatbot in 2016.It concentrated on criminal offences,but has since gone through several iterations and been extended to cover civil matters, including family, contract and tort law problems. The free bot (LawBot, then LawBot X and briefly Elexirr) is hosted on Facebook Messenger and aims to help users to apply the law to problems by asking them a series of structured questions.It can also refer them to law firmsif they need further advice. Plans to launch a cryptocurrency to raise funds to develop Case Crunch’s project have been put on hold while the team evaluate options, including more traditional investment. “We arenot in a hurry and want to get the right money in the right way,” Bull says.Joshua Browder says his inbox is burstingwith hate mail from lawyers, whichseems a bit unfair as the London-bornStanford University student is nothing ifnot likeable and polite.On the other hand, Browder, 20, hasunequivocally stated his desire toundermine the core business model of thelegal profession. For Browder, who manywill view as a precocious upstart, themodel of highly trained and professionallyqualified human beings giving consideredlegal advice — and charging their clientsby the hour for the privilege — is asoutmoded as the steam railway engine.The problem for the profession isthat Browder does not just talk a goodgame around disrupting traditional legalworking practices. He is already puttingtheory into action.In June last year Browder launchedthe “robot lawyer” DoNotPay app thatallowed motorists to challenge parkingtickets through an easy online process.A year later he created a free softwarebot for contesting potentially erroneouscouncil tax bills.And his most recent gambit, launchedlast month, is an addition to the DoNotPayapp that facilitates claims in the US againstEquifax, the credit consumer creditagency that recently suffered a large-scalecustomer data breach.Browder was raised in Hendon, northLondon and is in the third year ofcomputer science degree at Stanford inCalifornia. Furthering the mystiquearound him, Browder lives in the housethat was once rented by another studentbrainbox who went on to transform thetech world: Mark Zuckerberg.The Englishman may be setting out todestroy legal profession conventions, buthis manner is non-confrontational.Speaking to The Times in San Francisco,he appears almost embarrassed to revealthat his projects so far have provokedsuch anger.“I get that all the time,” he says, referringto outraged emails from the legal profes-sionals. “So many lawyers think that youneed the human touch to file a document.But the position with the law — especiallyin the UK — is that if you fit a certain listof criteria, then you are entitled to x, y, z.It can be just a question of filling in theforms. Lawyers tend to make the processseem more complicated than it actually is.And they should be worried if they arecharging a lot for doing very little.”What has Browder got against lawyers?Was there a nasty legal incident in hischildhood or his family’s background? No,he says, shrugging. And, moreover, Brow-der is adamant that he actually likes andrespects lawyers.“They are amazing people, and theyhave helped me out a lot,” he says, citingDamien Weiss, a partner in the Palo Altooffice of the US law firm Wilson SonsiniGoodrich & Rosati, for having providedpractical and mentoring advice.Browder points out that he alsoreceives much more fan than hate mail.“Unfortunately, it is outnumbered byemails from people saying, ‘I see you helpwith parking fines, but I’m being evictednext week — can you help me?’ That isreally hard to deal with. Many peoplethink that I’m a lawyer and I have to makeit clear to them that I’m not.”Browder is by no means completelydogmatic in his advocacy of robot lawyers.There is, he concedes, still a role forface-to-face advice from lawyers. “Lots of legal tech apps will tell peoplethat if the app can’t help them, then theydon’t have a case,” he says. “That wronglydiscourages people and I don’t do that.I provide escalation procedures whereMission to disrupt traditionI will refer people to lawyer advisers.”Still, Browder quietly returns to hismain theme — that most lawyers andconventionally structured firms “arecharging huge amounts of money foroutdated processes, for simply copyingand pasting documents”.Browder is also slightly dismissive ofthe attempts by traditional firms toembrace technological developments. Heacknowledges that there has been “hugeinnovation on the enterprise side arounddocument search and e-disclosure”. However, he argues that that progresshas not reached “ordinary consumers interms of cost savings. Law firms arecharging clients the same amount eventhough they are making savings onprocesses internally.”Is Browder really a lawyer manqué,harbouring a secret desire to qualify intothe profession? “I might dream of that,” heconcedes, before confessing that youthfulimpatience gets the better of him.“It would take too long,” he says ofa potential legal qualification. “The timeis now to do all of this stuff, rather thansitting through law school classes. Butperhaps one day.”CATHERINE BAKSIThursday October 19 2017Looking aheadthe timesSTUDENT LAW11Adding context to recruitingJoshua Browder rents the same house in Palo Alto, California, as the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once did“Lawyers should be worriedif they are charging a lot for doing very littleLINDA TSANGSTEPHEN LAM