The Impact Lawyers Magazine had the pleasure to conduct an email interview with James Moore, co-founder and CTO at Flex Legal, an online platform to connect pre vetted law students with law firms and GC for a flexible, on demand service. 

Legal work can ramp up without warning and be stressful work. Our platform connects legal teams to pre-vetted lawyers and paralegals for a flexible on-demand service. We improve the end clients experience, create happier, more agile teams and keep overhead costs low.

Unlike many other legal tech start-ups and innovators, we believe the future of law is human. Our mission is to redesign the way we work to help people make smarter life/work choices.  

Our ‘human’ value runs through everything we do. We meet every single client, paralegal and lawyer to discuss their culture, ambitions and personal stories. We are very involved in the legal community and spend a significant amount of time coaching those who are entering the profession to ensure they have the best start possible. Our Google reviews are worth a read! 

Many law firms recognise the need to work smarter, not harder and have followed their peers in adopting software, flexible resourcing or online subscriptions to create efficiency. I think there is still a long way to go and clients will continue to expect law firms to innovate as we move into the fourth industrial revolution and we see other industries experience disruption.

The two single largest costs to any law firm are their people and property. Firms that are driving efficiencies are finding innovative ways to provide excellent service whilst controlling these costs. The Coronavirus has kickstarted the move to remote working and we expect to see this trend to continue. I would also expect to see firms continue to find ways to automate tasks and find opportunities for their teams to work in a more efficient way. 

Ultimately, our mission is to redesign the way we work. 2020 forced many legal teams to change the way they operate and we plan to embrace this trend towards remote working, flexibility and lean teams in 2021 to grow our platform.

The SRA’s new Solicitor Qualification Exam (SQE) will also come into force in September 2021 and will slowly replace the LPC and training contract route. Every aspiring solicitor will be required to pass two exams and complete two years work experience in order to qualify rather than having to get a training contract. We expect the SQE to be a huge success and for Flex to play our part in this. We are developing our SQE diary to help those left out by the current system find routes to qualification. We expect many of the 15,000 or so students without a training contract each year to embrace the new SQE model.