Innovate Trials
4 August 2023
As part of our SRA Innovate programme, we are committed to working with technology providers to trial new technologies in order to improve understanding of their potential and whether they could improve the delivery of legal services in the future.
What is a trial?
A trial is a “road test” of new and emerging technology in a controlled safe space.
The purpose of a trial is to increase our understanding of new and emerging technology and determine whether it can have wider benefits to our regulated community and increase access to legal services for consumers.
What we can offer
Our support will help you understand any potential regulatory risks or issues that different types of technology may pose.
Through our trial you will have the opportunity to demonstrate how your technology operates and the benefits it can offer legal firms and consumers.
We will usually share the outcome of the trial as research or a case study, helping your technology reach legal service providers and consumers.
We encourage any providers of legal technology, which may have the potential to improve legal services, to get in touch to discuss possible trials. We are particularly interested in technology that supports access to legal services and high-risk areas, such as AML compliance.
If you are interested in finding out more, please contact us: contact us.
Our criteria
We will assess the opportunities your innovation or technology has for trial using our selection criteria:
- Strategy: the extent to which the technology aligns to our corporate objective and areas of business plan priority.
- Impact: the extent to which the technology addresses equality and diversity considerations and helps to meet the needs of the public, business community, regulated entities and the economy.
- Urgency: how quickly the legal services market needs to deal with a perceived risk or needs a particular solution.
- Maturity: the extent to which the technology is close to being market ready.
- Insight: what the SRA and wider industry can learn from testing the technology.
- Complexity: usability of the technology or innovation and degree of suitability for what it’s trying to achieve.
Example: SRA to test the value of intelligibility technology for the legal sector
As part of its ongoing commitment to encourage innovation in the legal sector we are carrying out a trial testing the use of document intelligibility technology.
Through the trial we will explore and test how AI-based technology can be used to help simplify and make documents within the legal sector more accessible, especially for consumers.
This project is the first such trial delivered under this initiative, with more expected to follow in due course.