Most of us have a picture in our mind of the legal world as it used to be. The picture, I suspect, is often taken from a Dickensian story featuring a long quill pen, a rolled foolscap sheet, and a wizened clerk writing an endless legal document.

The new Pre-Action Protocol for Low Value Personal Injury Claims in Road Traffic Accidents makes me long for the return of the quill pen! At least it was genuinely necessary in those days to have knowledge of the law, even if the language was unintelligible and documents went on for ever.

I don’t know what it cost to create the new process but I wish they’d spent it on the Courts system itself – whether Judges, or Court Clerks, or the Court’s IT systems (which, I have strong reason to believe, pre-date Windows). Something that might show that the desired end was a more effective Civil Law system.

Of course, the new Pre-Action Protocol is supposed to be consumer friendly. It is supposed to speed up the purgatory that is a personal injury claim.

But, God give me strength! – it relies on the internet. And, in relying on the internet, it relies on the kind of people who write for the internet. And, excuse me for being outspoken on this subject: people who write clever stuff for the internet are not always user friendly, are they? I don’t mean to say they don’t write terribly clever code. But when I have to enter meaningless gibberish in order to complete an internet form, I really do want to put my hand out to grab the quill pen. At least when lawyers used the quill pen, there was the reassurance that words probably did mean something, even if it was almost impossible to work out what that something was!

What is my point? Don’t all internet sites have oddities? Foibles? Maybe that is right. But it really does seem to me that there is something shockingly flawed in our Legal System when, in order to complete a Legal Form (there is no other way to start a claim as from 30th April 2010) I must enter meaningless data.

Now, that seems to me not very different to the quill pen approach to law.

The programmer is not interests in the real facts of the claim. The programmer thinks: data. So the programmer doesn’t care if I put 000 in the place where a non-existent date is a mandatory requirement. Perhaps I should put 666. Perhaps I just shouldn’t worry. Perhaps I should just continue in my new role as Data Entry Clerk for the insurance industry.

And that, in the end, is the real point. Whilst my firm will argue the real legal issues when they need to be argued, the new system, so far, looks exactly like the commoditization of legal services which the insurance industry wants. And, in this context, the odd byte or billion of gibberish really doesn’t matter.

Article posted on Friday, February, 11th, 2011 at 11:47 am

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