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Letter from America

29 January 2016 / Roger Smith
Issue: 7684 / Categories: Opinion , Legal aid focus
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Roger Smith reports on the US legal aid situation

This month, your tireless NLJ correspondent took himself to San Antonio, Texas. I do not, in general, recommend this destination. It contains an over-developed Riverwalk, an over-hyped Alamo, a bunch of military bases and the rest is pretty much carparks and hotels. However, for the last couple of years, it has been the home of an interesting conference on technology in the delivery of what we would call legal aid held by the rough equivalent of the Legal Aid Agency (the US Legal Services Corporation (LSC)). Attendance is an intriguing mix of techies, lawyers, managers and salespeople—making the success of opening conversational gambits to strangers more than usually random.

The big picture

The conference was addressed by two big beasts of the American legal establishment—immediate past American Bar Association president William Hubbard and the LSC’s own president, Jim Sandman. Both had a similar message on the impact of technology on the practice of law. It made him think, said Hubbard, revealing a rather surprising knowledge of

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NEWS
Artificial intelligence may be revolutionising the law, but its misuse could wreck cases and careers, warns Clare Arthurs of Penningtons Manches Cooper in this week's NLJ
Small law firms want to embrace technology but feel lost in a maze of jargon, costs and compliance fears, writes Aisling O’Connell of the Solicitors Regulation Authority in this week's NLJ
The Supreme Court issued a landmark judgment in July that overturned the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, once poster boys of the Libor and Euribor scandal. In NLJ this week, Neil Swift of Peters & Peters considers what the ruling means for financial law enforcement
Charles Pigott of Mills & Reeve reports on Haynes v Thomson, the first judicial application of the Supreme Court’s For Women Scotland ruling in a discrimination claim, in this week's NLJ
Bea Rossetto of the National Pro Bono Centre makes the case for ‘General Practice Pro Bono’—using core legal skills to deliver life-changing support, without the need for niche expertise—in this week's NLJ
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