Innovation and Disruption in Legal Processes

Andrew Gaule talks with Andrew Thornton barrister at Erskine Chambers and founder of Sparqa Legal a solution

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Andrew Gaule: Could you give us a brief introduction to yourself first, please?

Andrew Thornton: I essentially have two roles. My day to day job is practising as a barrister at Erskine Chambers, which is a corporate law specialist chambers. This work involves mainly advising on public company takeovers and related matters.

But over the last 15 years I’ve heavily invested in start-ups. Most notably I was a seed investor and a director of SwiftKey, which was the predictive keyboard acquired by Microsoft in 2016. And I sit on a range of start-up boards.

In the legal sector I’ve been involved with the founding of four companies. The first one was, rather bizarrely given what we’re doing today, a legal podcasting service called CPDcast, where we provided training to barristers and solicitors by 30-minute question and answer podcasts. We launched that in 2007 and sold it to Informa plc in 2010.

In 2016, we launched a company called FromCounsel.com, and that provides a premium corporate law knowledge service to law firms and in-house counsel. Commercial launch was, I think, November 2016, and since then we’ve signed up 70% of the leading law firms in the UK, including all the Magic Circle law firms and most US firms with a London presence.

The second current business in the legal sector we have is called Juriosity, so curiosity but with a j, and that is a directory and knowledge sharing platform which we have joint ventured with the Bar Council of England and Wales to launch. At the moment about half the barristers in the UK use that service, and we’re currently expanding it out to in-house lawyers and law firms.

Then last but not least is Sparqa Legal, which launches in Feb 2019, and that is aimed at providing businesses with accessible legal guidance so that they can undertake many of the legal tasks they need to themselves, rather than going to a lawyer or an accountant or relying on a Google search.

Great to see a breadth and depth of experience and a lot of change and innovation there over the years. Why so many businesses in the legal sector and what’s the common theme that you’re now driving?

I think the common theme is really accessibility. It’s always seemed to us that in an ideal world a lawyer seeking legal guidance or a business seeking legal guidance would be able to go along to a vault or a guru or something of that nature, and ask the question and be given an answer that is not only up to date and correct, but is capable of being actioned by them. 

So the answer that would be given would be different to, say, a partner in a Magic Circle law firm, to the answer that would be given to a small business person. But the key would be that the answer they would give them would help them do whatever they have to do. Whether that is, if you are the partner in the Magic Circle law firm, to go and advise a client, and if you’re the business person to produce the document or take the course of action that you need to take.

And linked to this idea is the concept that when somebody has a legal question there will be someone out there who either knows the answer to that question or is best placed to work out what the answer to that question is. But in the current market it’s very difficult, very unlikely that the person with the question is going to go and ask the right person, and it would be really just a question of chance. You don’t necessarily know who the relevant person is.

And it seems to me that we can get huge savings of time and cost if it was possible, either for the person with the question to have direct access to the person who knows the answer, or even better, for all of the answers to be pulled together upfront so that they can be accessed through some sort of electronic search or something like that.

So everything we’re doing is loosely based on that premise, that people should be able to access the best possible answer to the legal issue they face, whether the person with the question is an experienced lawyer looking for advice in relation to an intricate area of law, or a business person seeking guidance on a commercial issue they face.

Allied to that, both FromCounsel and Sparqa Legal, are based on a Q&A style. We adopted this as we discovered when building CPDcast, the podcasting business, that question and answer was a really great way of consuming legal information. It’s much easier to read a short question and answer which is directly relevant to what you’re seeking to achieve, rather than a long chapter. And that’s particularly the case when you’re consuming the information on a screen rather than on a page.

Ultimately we realised that whenever we do legal research we’re doing it with a view to answering a question, so why not structure the information to reflect the task that the person that’s seeking the information is seeking to achieve.

So when we launched FromCounsel and as we launched Sparqa Legal, we provide detailed guidance in a Q&A form with how to guides and automated document generation services. FromCounsel is aimed at premium end of the market, so providing information to lawyers who will then provide it or apply it to advise a client. And then Sparqa Legal which is much more a direct interaction between us and the underlying client, so we put the information in a different way, it’s first person rather than third person.

But underlying that is a belief that a smart business person, given the right information and tools, ought to be able to undertake lots of tasks they would regard as legal, to a standard equivalent to the standard that most lawyers could achieve. So it’s about accessibility and empowerment.

Great, good introduction there. I think this Q&A style really aligns well with the sort of things that I see working with the start-ups and ventures that I deal with. The entrepreneurs are saying, “Now I’ve got a question about employment and contracts in that space, now I need the answer. I don’t want to go off in a lot of ways to be able to do that.” So why, when and how did you start Sparqa Legal, to address this?

The team that sits behind Sparqa Legal has experience both of practising law but also running businesses, both large and small. And we felt that technology ought to create opportunities to source legal guidance in a way and at a cost not previously possible. And I think we’re not giving away too much today, but we’re both old enough to remember the pre-internet age.

Before Google and so forth, if you were a lawyer looking for legal information you really had two options. You would go and speak to somebody who knew, so one of your colleagues possibly. Or you went down to the library and you got a textbook out and you looked for the answer.

If you were a business seeking legal information, highly unlikely, there were books out there for small businesses and in principle you could go and buy legal texts, but that’s not what would happen in reality. So companies were rather faced with the only option of doing something without any advice or going and speaking to somebody who they thought might help them, so a lawyer, and accountant or just somebody they knew who they thought might have the relevant experience.

What the development of the online world has brought is a third option, which is trying to source the information online. However, if you simply do a Google search and come across what appears to be relevant information, you’re still not sure whether it’s right or whether it’s up to date and whether you can really rely on it. 

You’re still sort of taking a risk if you just do a Google search, and what often happens is the information you’ll find online, some of it’s very good. For example, the government website on guidance to EIS relief and so forth is actually very good. But if you go onto the internet and do a search for an HR issue, you may well find a note from a law firm but they tend to take the form of something that I described as a ‘teaser document’. It will identify that you will probably have an issue but it won’t tell you how to solve it, because the whole purpose of putting the article up is to try and persuade you to go and consume their legal service at an hourly rate.

I think the hourly rate is important. It seems to me, having run a number of small business, that the hourly rates system, I can absolutely understand as a lawyer why it’s there, but it means that cash flow uncertainty can be pretty awful for an underlying client. You just really don’t know what your legal expenses are going to be over a month or over a year and so forth, and that’s unattractive.

So I think one of the things we’re trying to do with Sparqa Legal is move more towards a subscription model where you can access the legal information you require, up to a certain point because there will always be a situation where you need to go and get bespoke advice from an experienced lawyer.

But quite a lot of the tasks at the moment you’re faced with going to a lawyer could be done yourself and could be done by way of a subscription. And that could be a subscription for the current service, which is to access the Q&A and the documents and the guidance, but in due course to move to a situation where for simple queries you can speak to somebody at the end of the telephone or by email who can answer further questions you may have within a subscription model.

Yes, I think that change in the model is so important. From being on the customer side of it, when you don’t understand what the process is and you get a quote and there’s always that, “Plus extras,” it really becomes an issue. And then even for doing a standard document you don’t necessarily know what the risks of the costs are.

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To understand how innovation and venturing can become strategic see Purpose to Performance, Innovative New Value Chains by Andrew Gaule