Most innovation in the legal industry is aimed at helping lawyers, Law Newbie is different
This article was produced in partnership with Donich Law
A few years ago, while swimming through what felt like a million emails and notifications, Jordan Donich, principal lawyer at Donich Law, realized we were living in a time of peak information on the internet. But, just because information was readily available, didn’t mean finding it was easy, especially for people looking for legal advice or help navigating the criminal justice system.
“Doing legal research is horrible. And if it’s horrible for me, how much worse is it for the customer,” Donich says. “I started asking myself how can I manage this better. How can I manage this better for our customers?”
The status quo was ripe for a shake-up, and innovations, like generative Artificial Intelligence, were beginning to rumble. Now, a technological revolution is coming to the legal industry and, according to Donich, if lawyers don’t get on board, they risk being run over. That’s one of the reasons Donich created and launched Law Newbie, a kind of mini-site on Donich Law’s website, dedicated to providing answers to people who need law advice but can’t necessarily pay for it.
Call it a pre-emptive defense against AI-driven obsolescence. But, unlike a lot of tech, Law Newbie is focused on the demand side. “Most technology is created for lawyers because that's how you make money. You sell it to lawyers,” Donich says. “Lawyers buy it to increase productivity and run their practices. This is where all the innovation has been in the last 10 years. Few are innovating for customers. That's a problem.”
What makes that problem more difficult is that there isn’t much incentive to fix it. “It takes me away from billing work, it takes me away from servicing clients. It's costly. There's no immediate return. You can waste your time. There are a lot of reasons not to do it. Any innovation we've seen has been in transactional areas of the law, like wills estates or real estate because you can monetize it easier.,” he says. “Which makes sense. But from a consumer education standpoint, there's not a ton of innovation. I don’t think you could make money off it, not directly.”
That’s not to say creating Law Newbie was entirely altruistic. “There’s probably an indirect benefit—customers may like us more and potentially be converted to a client, but that’s about it,” he says. Plus as a criminal lawyer, Donich’s office gets several calls every day from people facing charges who are looking for free advice. If Law Newbie can answer those questions, then there’s more time available to focus on paying customers.
To that end, what Law Newbie offers is a comprehensive listing of the Criminal Code of Canada, along with potential defenses for each crime. It covers over 160 criminal charges including, offences related to people, vehicles, fraud, property, weapons, the administration of justice and sex crimes.
“People don't really care about the definition of an assault. They want to know how to get out of a problem. Or how much worse their problem is going to get. Or they want to know if they’ll need help, or how long it's going to take. That's what people want to know,” Donich says. “We had to put some work into providing that user experience. It's very hard to make legal information user-friendly. Number one, you have to be a lawyer. And then you need to take it a step further and know how to simplify the law. And to do that, you need to know what people want. You need experience.”
And experience is where AI falls short, Donich says. “Lawyers and professionals will be involved in certain areas for a long time, those areas are medical, financial, and legal, because those are high-risk areas where if the information is inaccurate, people can suffer harm.” Of course, that doesn’t mean law professionals should be complacent, especially when innovations like Law Newbie can make life easier for everyone.
“A good user experience is somebody who gets the information they want, and then they can make a more informed decision of what they need help with, or whether they need legal advice in the first place. And, in turn, it eases pressure on my business.”
Jordan Donich has been a lawyer for over 10 years and represents clients in English and French in civil litigation, professional regulation and criminal defence. He is known as a leader in Canada’s legal tech sector, and the developer of Law Newbie.
