Legal technology is modernising traditional legal – most developments being aimed at increasing the productivity and efficiency of lawyers. But we can’t overlook the client experience!

The team at Claimify have spent the last 6 months developing an online legal service that provides convenience, transparency and empowerment to clients. At the heart of Claimify sits our values: Simplicity, Empathy, Daring, Trust, and Clarity.

Claimify will launch in the first half of 2019, with features including:

•  Online self-serve interview
• Online engagement and ID verification
• Fixed price offering
• Claim prediction tool
• Lawyer QA checkpoints
• Workflow automation and
•  Interactive client portal.

The solution is set to transform how law is done – putting the client front and centre! A little more on the client solution…

Convenience

Banking has moved online. Shopping has moved online. Why shouldn’t we be able to access legal help from the comfort of home at a time that suits? Why aren’t legal services online?

Typical office hours for legal services are 9 to 5 on a Monday to Friday, but they’re also the typical working hours for our clients. If the everyday person wants to see a lawyer, they often need to take time off work to visit a lawyer – assuming they can access a physical office.

Our online self-serve interview process enables clients to tell their story and seek advice at a time and place that is convenient to them.

Nailing the right questions in a self-serve online interview platform, with an investment in data structure to capture client responses, enables the efficient assessment and scoping of a claim, and a rapid turnaround to provide clients with an advice on the key things they need to know –

• Do I have a claim?
• How much is it worth?
• How much will it cost?
• How long will it take? and
• What next?

As legal technologists, we can take this one step further and not just facilitate enquires online, but also actively engage clients in the end to end life cycle of their legal claim online. Smart, clean, design-focussed web interfaces can be developed to interact with clients throughout their entire legal journey, with a focus on ease and convenience.

The team at Claimify have reviewed interactions with clients during the claim lifecycle, and have unearthed that for a single claim, a client could be asked over 500 questions, with the same question asked multiple times through a combination of face-to-face interviews or phone calls, and reams of paperwork.

With new data management and analysis methods, and changes to electronic document procedures, we have cut down and structured the number of questions, all asked online through the client’s own web portal to their Claim. As an added bonus, since the client responses are captured in a structured way, we can automate the paperwork, leaving the lawyer to focus on the real legal issues – not the admin.

Transparency

Legal processes typically involve significant exchanges of information and paperwork to and from the client. Detailed information is required to properly assess and run a claim. But from a client’s perspective, it can be overwhelming and difficult to make sense of it all.

At Claimify, we’ve taken a design approach to guide how information is presented to clients. We’ve developed some basic principles around communication methods which we believe are digestible and provide clarity and transparency. Here are our 5 rules for transparent communication-

1. Advices shouldn’t exceed a page – they are smart, clean and to the point, giving the client clarity around the things that are important to them.
2. Claim updates are sent via the client’s preferred communication method – SMS or email. They are sharp, snappy and to the point.
3. Lengthy advices on standard legal concepts are provided via FAQs – embedded as links in all updates and advices.
4. Adopt a writing style that ditches legalese and formality – our communications have been vetted by non-lawyers to make sure they hit the mark for the everyday person.
5. Use a Claim Tracker – a visual timeline showing the client exactly where their claim is and what comes next.

As an added bonus, we’ve also developed a machine learning tool that predicts claim outcomes during early stages. Mining the past decade of data and documents, we’ve identified the material contributors to claim outcomes and built these into a tool to serve as a guide to our lawyers in providing fast, early advice to clients about their claim. It also informs our decision around price – a commitment we make to our clients at the start to fix our fee so there are no nasty surprises. It doesn’t get more transparent than that!

Empowerment

Now, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and it would be naive to think that a web service will make everyone legal experts. However, with appropriate to-do lists, reminders and frequent contact with the legal team, clients are empowered to handle certain aspects of their claim and control where it is heading.

It depends on the area of law, but in many situations, most people see a lawyer when they need help. It’s easy for clients to feel powerless and unable to control their situation.

The Claimify model allows clients to be more than passengers in their Claim. Through our online system, our clients can actively contribute to their Claim by:

• Checking Claim information, Claim Status and what comes next (via Claim Tracker)
• Actioning tasks and providing instructions
• Signing documents online
• Uploading and viewing pictures, reports, logbooks, and other documents
• Accessing FAQs
• Viewing messages from us
• Updating their details
• Providing us feedback whenever they like – with our custom emojis!

Beyond empowerment, a further benefit from the client doing some leg work is that the workload of the law firm is reduced, thus reducing the cost to run the claim.

We’re launching soon!

Claimify is set to transform how law is done for consumers. Look out for us online!

About our blogger

Claimify is the brainchild of the team at Nerve Solutions Group, led by Jodie Willey.

We’re a small young team, with diverse backgrounds covering finance, IT, science, and of course law.

Common to all of us is a passion for data and innovation to improve the legal industry.