AI and Lawtech solutions to the age-old problem of sourcing Counsel at short notice: A Management perspective

I have spent fifteen years working in local authority child protection law, including seven years managing a busy children’s legal team conducting public law Children Act proceedings. I have worked both as a case holder that instructs counsel and as a manager of other case holding lawyers. Throughout that time, a regular source of stress and additional admin has been the listing of urgent, short- notice hearings and difficulties securing counsel.

Sourcing Counsel: The Problem in Practice

Whenever an urgent hearing is listed a calculation inevitably follows: Can the case-holder or a colleague (perhaps an in house advocate) cover the matter or is external counsel needed?

More often than not the in-house team is already committed to the management of existing cases - court directions and advocacy alike, so the focus soon turns to securing external counsel.

In my experience most local authority lawyers and teams rely on trusted chambers with known advocates. That familiarity reduces risk and supports consistent standards before the court.

Availability of known and trusted counsel is often the real issue. Lags between emailing or calling clerks and counsel being confirmed will often compound the stress of the situation and make it necessary to check with more than one set of chambers. The additional admin involved is in addition to complexities associated with needing to adhere to panel arrangements and seeking internal expenditure approvals.

The issue is structural rather than attributable to individual personnel: there is little shared visibility of who may actually be free. Emails and discussions are often duplicated and the time spent can soon add up.

The reality is that sometimes in very urgent matters it is only through personal connections and direct text messages/calls to counsel that are known to be at the relevant court that counsel is secured.

Clerked - a Lawtech-enhanced solution to an age old problem.

I was excited to learn of the solution that Clerked has built. The I.T. solution, powered by A.I., focuses on a single point of friction and aims to provide a simple solution - earlier visibility in real-time of potential counsel availability.

I understand that what Clerked is offering is:-
1. Integration with a barrister’s diary.
2. The surfacing of real-time availability through it’s AI-powered search function
3. Early indication through ClerkedLive of any Barristers at (or due to be at) the relevant Court.

When boiled down to its essence it is difficult not to draw parallels between Clerked's solution for the advocacy market and that provided by Uber for private taxi cab services.

Practical benefits of tech-enhanced streamlining of instructing counsel

From a management perspective it seems clear that the problem identified by Clerked is long-standing and immediately recognisable to any care practitioner. Administrative time spent locating available counsel - whether at short notice or otherwise - has been absorbed for years because no simple alternative existed.

Even in those legal teams where there is an in-house solution or where there is a panel/framework arrangement in place, the fact remains that diary systems are not integrated and there is almost always a lag between an enquiry and an instruction proceeding.

When those same lags are compounded over a year across a high-volume in-house service, the lost time unarguably accumulates.

What attracts me to Clerked / ClerkedLive is the idea that the wheel is not being reinvented. Existing processes are not being upended - they are being made more efficient so that solicitors and their support staff are freed up to work more efficiently. This not only seems likely to save resources but should also, through a reduced administrative burden, go a small way to promoting greater staff wellbeing which will likely pay dividends.

I am looking forward to trying Clerked out and seeing how it might assist me to adopt a more efficient way of working with external counsel. I suspect that other local government lawyers and managers are too.

www.clerked.co.uk