April King Legal to offer clients AI legal advice with Amelia

Amelia, an IPsoft Company, says that April King Legal, a Nottingham-based private client law firm specialising in personal and corporate succession law, has introduced its industry leading digital colleague, Amelia. The partnership will see Amelia take on the high volumes of client enquiries April King receives and will lower the barrier to entry for legal advice. 

After recognising that the legal profession was being left behind in the wave of digital transformation, catalysing a dramatic shift in the business landscape, April King saw an opportunity to enhance its operations and customer service support through conversational AI. The Amelia platform was picked over its competitors thanks to its unique capabilities, such as its Natural Language Processing (NLP) and emotional intelligence.

In the role of digital legal assistant, Amelia will adopt April King’s formal but warm conversational style when dealing with clients and will be named after the firm itself. Over a three-part implementation programme, the Amelia platform will start:

• Serving requests for legal resources - In the first phase of her implementation, Amelia will handle the thousands of inbound enquiries that April King receives from customers looking to obtain its free information packs about wills, trusts and probates. Employees at April King would previously spend hours every day handling the large volumes of enquiries, a time-intensive and, in turn, costly initiative for the business. Releasing employees from this workload will empower them to focus on direct client liaison and case management.

• Acting as the first point of contact for clients - In the second phase, Amelia will enable clients to book meetings via her own online interface without needing to call or email the firm. With over 40,000 clients, diary management can be a complex challenge. As well as relieving employees of this administrative burden, they’ll be able to fully switch off at the end of the day knowing Amelia is available to clients 24/7 to manage their appointment requests.

• Offering free legal advice - To help April King achieve its mission of delivering the greatest possible customer experience and making its legal expertise more accessible, the final implementation is expected to introduce Amelia to clients as a triaging tool. In this role, she will become the first point of contact for all new clients, trained to offer initial legal advice to clients and triage cases effectively. By implementing Amelia in this way, the firm hopes to make its legal advice more affordable, providing free-of-charge general advice at the triage stage ahead of a formal meeting with one of its advisors. It will make the initial customer journey more efficient, engaging and informative with the aim of encouraging client uptake and reducing drop off.

Paul King, CEO of April King Legal said: “The legal industry in the UK has fallen behind on customer expectations, with most other sectors having already advanced further down their digital transformation journey – particularly for AI adoption. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the sensitive nature of our work. However, the sophistication offered by the Amelia platform means that we have complete confidence in her ability to serve our clients in an accurate and emotionally cognisant manner. Indeed, we have such faith in her ability to act as a digital legal assistant that we are exploring how she can provide free-of-charge general advice, which will help us with our mission to make legal counsel more accessible to all.”

Faisal Abbasi, Managing Director Western Europe & MEMA, Amelia added: “The massive shift towards digital service consumption over the past year has transformed customer expectations for every industry. The legal sector is no exception - and digital experience has become the new customer battleground. There is immense potential for AI-powered digital legal assistants to offer a superior customer experience, while driving impressive productivity gains through the automation of previously time-intensive, mundane tasks. We are thrilled to be partnering with April King Legal as they set a new benchmark for intelligent digital services in what has been, to date, a rather risk-averse industry.”

Unlike chatbots and more limited virtual assistants that react to keyword-driven instructions and follow static decision trees, the cognitive brain of the Amelia platform allows users to have natural, human-like conversations to execute tasks or resolve queries. Using advanced NLP, Amelia is also able to handle complex conversations and digressions, follow context switching, and independently execute complex tasks to resolve user requests. Her state-of-the-art affective computing and sentiment analysis enable her to recognise and adapt her responses based on the mood of the user and the context of the situation. These skills are constantly improving through her automated learning capabilities.