Freelaw: Open-Sourcing The Law

‘freelaw’ is happening right now, slowly but surely. We are making law accessible to all. By that we mean not just free to access for the common person, but, more importantly, making the law easy to understand, and even easy for individuals to use to fight for their rights. Obviously law is a complex subject and therefore not always straightforward to understand, but this is not helped by the 'legalese' language which seems to be used by lawyers who have a vested interest in keeping the subject complicated. We have been trying to make law accessible for all for many years at Monaco Solicitors, where we try to make employment law easier to understand for employees by writing about it in plain English. We do this to empower employees in regards to their rights – in an attempt to re-address the imbalance of power between employers and their workers. With the advent of artificial intelligence and chatbots, the potential for demystifying the law has further increased. We plan to use these bots for our practice website, but then we would like to throw this technology out to the gig economy, and workers for corporations such as Deliveroo and Sports Direct who might need our help. If we can then take one step further and apply this template to the developing world and help people in, for example, ex-Commonwealth countries such as Zimbabwe, Kenya and South Africa, it would be a dream come true. Please do steal or borrow our idea by the way! It would be great to see this implemented across the globe – I personally would like to not make any money out of this project. Thanks for listening. Alex Monaco, Solicitor-Advocate (All Higher Courts) alex.monaco@monacosolicitors.co.uk