Client onboarding technology can save you time and your clients money

In the August 2019 edition of The Review I set out the rationale for the creation of a digital innovation platform to address the obstacles encountered when seeking advice from family law specialists: anxieties about cost, loss of control, tension with the perception of “lawyering up”, and a healthy dread of being sucked into a court process.

The digital innovation platform duly materialised: it was called Family Law Lab. The first application hosted there was an online triage tool or guided pathway called Engage, which gathered information, at no charge, from prospective clients before a first consultation. Engage had been developed by Family Law Partners, based in the south-east of England and launched with its own clients in 2014. Engage was, and still is, an AI system, although we shied away from employing the term at that time because it seemed to inspire mistrust amongst some practitioners. Things have changed since then!

This article will address what happened when Engage was shared across several family law firms in England and Wales, and the lessons it may offer for the practice of family law in an AI-enabled professional context. This article also will share the plans for Engage and a sister AI application called Resolve, which aims to accelerate the awareness of NCDR options for the public.

The pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated digital innovation across various sectors, with healthcare and education rapidly adopting remote and automated solutions. Family law was no exception, with legal professionals increasingly relying on digital tools, especially video conferencing, to facilitate their work in a socially distanced world. Whilst the original intention, as set out in my 2019 Review article, was to run a limited pilot of Engage, Covid changed that. Recognising the need to support uninterrupted legal advice access during lockdowns, we decided, in October 2020, to make Engage available to all interested Resolution members. Through word of mouth 45 family law firms eventually adopted Engage. This led to over 16,000 members of the public using Engage to instruct their family lawyers. Engage has facilitated legal matters involving net assets worth over £4bn.

Collaboration opportunities

Digital applications are necessarily fluid in their operation, and we took advantage of this. The structure and content of Engage has been amended, extended and enriched as feedback was received from family lawyers and client users. We actively pursued a collaborative approach with peers:

• Engage v3.0 incorporated refinements around domestic abuse and coercive control with assistance from Rights of Women; and we introduced questions around the impact of menopause.
• Engage 4.0 saw us asking leading mediators, including Angela Lake-Carroll, to help refine the mediation pathways in Engage. For example, might a client using Engage be coming from a mediation, and was that mediation successful, failed or merely stalled and capable of rescue? Refining the questions to be congruent with a client’s earlier experience made sense.
• Engage 5.0 (released April 2025) incorporates FPR Part 3 messaging for clients, reinforced child-inclusive mediation content, and explains the One Lawyer, One Couple model as well as new “client accommodation” questions. The latter, as has often happened in the evolution of Engage, plugged into the zeitgeist of the profession’s growing awareness of neurodiversity, before the release of the Family Justice Council’s subsequent guidance.

Measuring Engage’s effectiveness

A key question back in 2019 was: “Does Engage work?” We relied upon the clients to tell us. Engage’s utility has been validated through extensive feedback. I am told that a 10% user feedback rate on digital applications is the norm. A voluntary “60 seconds” survey at the end of the Engage user journey commands a 60% completion rate. Of those users providing feedback, 93% stated they would recommend Engage to family members.

Goodbye Family Law Lab, hello Nova

By mid-2024 it became clear that Engage needed a long-term financial model. The increased demand for Engage had moved beyond the objectives of a pilot programme and required sustained and significant financial and time resources. The Family Law Lab platform was effectively an access to justice initiative covering England & Wales but solely funded by one firm: Family Law Partners. This would not be sustainable in the long term. Additionally, Family Law Partners wished to transition to an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT), an ambition eventually realised in March 2025.

By Spring of 2024, Family Law Lab was rebranded as Nova, to reflect that Engage had progressed well beyond a the “pilot” and testing phase suggested by “lab”. The re-brand to Nova also reflected a broader ambition to host other legal tech prototypes, developed by Family Law Partners in conjunction with the University of Brighton via Innovate UK, but I will come on to that.

Transitioning to a charging model

Despite several investors being interested in Engage over the years, we did not feel able to pursue any opportunities, principally because we did not wish to charge the public for access to Engage. Understandably, this made no sense to investors although it made perfect (access to justice) sense to us. However, the increasing costs of maintaining Engage, the development of more product features, and the plans for an EOT at Family Law Partners concentrated our minds.

In the summer of 2024 the family law teams using the newly branded Nova platform were asked if they wished to continue using Engage and, if so, whether they would contribute to its operational costs. The response was overwhelmingly positive. Uniquely, for a software company introducing a revenue model, we asked the law firms what that charging model should look like.

Commencing on 1st November 2024, and based on lawyer feedback, Nova Engage adopted a default, pay-as-you-go model without contracts, installation fees or fixed monthly charges. This appears to be particularly beneficial to small law firms or family departments who may have fluctuating client demand or staff numbers. While Nova now operates independently as a limited company, Engage still receives continued support from Family Law Partners as part of that team’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy.

The case for an NCDR early intervention agent

Transitioning to a charging model for Engage required a significant cultural shift for the Nova team as we are used to providing access free of charge. We will continue to provide Engage without charge for purely pro bono initiatives such as university law clinics. A positive aspect of collecting fees from law firms is that potential clients have access for free, and Nova can accelerate development of a long-standing prototype: a digital early intervention agent for NCDR that we call Resolve.

Resolve began life as a research project with the University of Brighton through Innovate UK in 2017. The challenge set was to devise a conceptual model that could replicate the industry knowledge, and decision-making, of senior lawyers experienced in mediation, collaborative law, arbitration and the court process, including family consultants, in an algorithm. This became the Resolve algorithm, using Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA) from 13 different data points across six thematic categories, collected from the user (a potential client) through a digital questionnaire. The Resolve algorithm uses the responses to rank the suitability of each DR process for the user based upon that user’s circumstances and characteristics.

The Resolve algorithm attempts to answer the following client question: “What is the best dispute resolution model to resolve the issues in my divorce or separation based upon your knowledge of my specific circumstances?” For the avoidance of doubt, the Resolve algorithm is proprietary; it is not piggybacking on a Large Language Model such as ChatGPT and it never “hallucinates”.

The algorithm then had to be tested, which required additional expertise in CX (customer experience) and UX (user experience) to design a digital front end on a web page. During 2024 we initiated some public testing on a stripped-down version of Resolve limited to exploring four outcomes: DIY, mediation, solicitor-led negotiation and (albeit reluctantly) a court process. Whilst we do not have the space in this article to share all our findings, we were able to validate the following hypotheses:

• A well-designed digital application offering actionable insights on DR options provides a significantly better client experience than generic web content, most often in blog formats, on legal websites.
• A digital application, grounded in authentic legal expertise, will be trusted by the public.
• Digital delivery offers scaling opportunities to provide both public education about DR options and to facilitate decision-making that are utterly beyond the time resources of individual practitioners and firms.
• A digital application can reach members of the public “further upstream” of the normal pipeline of enquiries coming into law firms: users whose challenges had arisen within days, and sometimes even hours, were using the application and were open to all forms of non-court DR (validated by follow-up telephone calls).
• A digital application can cut through to the public by promoting the value propositions of ethically grounded, highly trained, regulated practitioners typically found amongst the Resolution membership.

During the initial testing period, 1,685 people received an AI-generated personalised analysis via Nova Resolve. Of those people, 588 went on to request contact with a human expert skilled in the DR model they had been matched with.

What next for Nova?

We will continue offering Engage to the profession: it has proven its utility, and we are advanced in design work for version 6.0 of the application.

Although LLMs are impressive, their functionality is not an improvement on the proprietary logic or algorithms behind either Nova Engage or Resolve, but we can conceive of opportunities to deploy LLMs to complement Nova’s core offers for the profession and we have started work on certain prototypes.

We have been encouraged by the public response to Nova Resolve and have extended the DR options to include hybrid mediation, ENE, the collaborative model, arbitration and the One Lawyer, One Couple offering. We will resume testing in spring/summer of 2025. The potential exists for the creation of a digital early intervention agent that can finally communicate the promise of NCDR to the public on a scale impossible to replicate with human time resources alone.

Overall, there is potential for Nova to fulfil its original conception: a platform hosting integrated applications, with a mixture of free and paid-for functionality that helps the profession address unmet needs. This promise may only be fully realised if investment is found from a source that aligns with the team’s ethical vision for facilitating the widest possible access to quality legal advice, rather than cherry-picking the market for those with the deepest pockets.

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