Cut price wills threaten law firms

Andrew Mellett was determined to rip up the rule book when he started his law firm Plexus, as much to offer work-life balance to his staff as to provide reasonably priced legal services to consumers.

"All legal tasks follow the same pattern," he observes. "A client has a problem, the lawyer collects facts about that problem, applies those facts to the law and generates an outcome, such as contract. Through clever technology, Plexus collects those facts using a smart digital form and uses a variant of artificial intelligence to apply those facts to the law in order to generate the outcome automatically. For example, Plexus's Promotions Wizard app automates the creation of terms and conditions, as well as permits, for organisations wanting to run a competition at a third of the cost of and 95 per cent faster than the traditional method."