In its 2020 survey, the Edelman Trust Barometer identified a paradox: ‘despite a strong global economy and near full employment, none of the four societal institutions that the study measures – government, business, NGOs and media – is trusted’.1 This is a rather grim sounding paradox. One can try to resolve it in a variety of ways. An obvious way would be to argue that when we measure trust, we are measuring a rather uninformative quantity. After all, trust can be considered good and a loss of trust would accordingly be bad only if and insofar as trust is placed in something or someone actually worthy of our trust. So, the true problem, one could argue, is not the loss of trust but the loss of trustworthiness – and this has not been measured.2 Whether trust is a good proxy for trustworthiness has yet to be established.

In the blossoming field of legal tech (LT)1 the majority of attention goes to the work of judges and advocates in the areas of dispute resolution, due diligence, and contract assessment.2 Far less consideration is given to what LT might contribute to consumer relations for businesses, which is also referred to as B2C relations.3 In this contribution, I would like to focus precisely on this area, as there are already developments underway that are legally relevant and may require legal intervention.

New technologies are promising a new world. It has now become apparent that blockchain technology will have many more future uses than simply supporting cryptocurrencies and other cryptoassets.1 Blockchain could support many new applications with a potentially disruptive impact on social life such as smart contracts, managing registers of assets, and the operation of autonomous agents. In addition, some governments intend to base essential government operations, such as land registries, on blockchain.2 This may potentially lead to the law being of diminishing importance in the world.3

Any discussion of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) necessarily relies on some basic, shared notions, allowing us to identify those procedures that are considered an alternative to litigation in national courts. When legal scholars refer to arbitration or mediation, for instance, they often take it for granted that those linguistic labels are sufficient to designate a certain procedure. To be sure, none of these labels have a monolithic quality: the word ‘arbitration’, for instance, designates a family of private adjudication phenomena, which can differ in significant ways. Each ADR mechanism, hence, is best understood as a spectrum of procedures. Nevertheless, all of the instances falling within that spectrum must necessarily have some shared broad-stroke feature, so that they can all (with an unavoidable degree of simplification) be referred to as arbitration, mediation or another ADR mechanism. In other words, there must necessarily be some boundaries that lawyers heuristically deploy to build a rough yet shared taxonomy of ADR.

As the practice of law is heavily impacted by recent and ongoing advances in technology, it is difficult to provide an accurate picture of either the status quo or the future of the profession whilst focusing on details. Therefore, this chapter focuses on general principles as well as underlying developments and mechanics, rather than detailed accounts of which legal department, agency or law firm is using which techniques or technologies.

The potential of digital solutions and legal tech (LT) for increasing access to justice is real. Although many LT developments focus on innovation of law practices, in several countries we see LT as champion of access to justice. These typically are new types of players in the market that provide legal services directly to the public. Even though practice-based evidence shows their positive impact, legal services regulations struggle to catch up and facilitate these developments. They, as a matter of fact, may actually hamper access to justice improvements. In that respect, it is illustrative that private investors acknowledge the potential of LT, but only dared to invest 2.8 per cent of their $1 billion total investments in 2018 in customer-facing services.1

Lex Mercatoria, Latin for ‘merchant law,’ is a very old concept that predates the rise of nation-states. During the medieval period, a body of legal conventions evolved through custom and commercial practice and was enforced by private courts along the merchant trade routes.1 Modern nation-states came to replace this traditional method of resolving disputes with domestic courts. But the gradual increase in international commerce has encouraged nations to defer to international arbitration as a solution to complex cross-border business disputes, and various other alternatives to lawsuits brought in civil courts.

Legal tech (LT) companies operating in litigation predominantly address B2C relationships, which is odd against the overall LT backdrop where B2B solutions prevail.1 A ‘no win no fee’ policy, whereby consumers are only charged for success, is popular among LT companies that manage claims.2 Even though their contingency fees tend to be significant,3 they attract consumers who would otherwise have abandoned a claim as a result of rational apathy due to its small value. The automated management of claims has impacted consumer access to justice as the activity of LT companies has led to an increase in redress for small value claims.4