Co-op Digital Blog

I’m James Antoniou, I head up the wills team at Co-op Legal Services. Over the last 10 months or so, me and my team of will writers have been working closely with James Boardwell’s team of digital specialists at Co-op Digital. Both teams wanted to make it simpler and faster to create a legally robust will for Co-op customers and by combining legal expertise and digital skills we’ve done just that.

Joanne Schofield wrote about how making a will can be daunting and how we’re trying to change that and more recently Becky Arrowsmith wrote about how we’ve improved the accessibility in our wills.

This is the first time I’ve worked alongside a digital team but I don’t think it’ll be the last. Here are my thoughts on it.

James: We looked at doing a fully online, end-to-end, digital service. I had a lot of reservations in that, and I think probably most lawyers would do, because they couldn’t see how a computer could be a substitute for 15 years’ worth of experience. So the way we built the service was as a hybrid between being able to take the benefits of the accessibility of starting online, but also making sure that everyone who went through the service took advice to make sure that what they were looking to do was, in fact, having the right legal impact of what they were actually looking to achieve.

So the digital way of working is something that was very new to me. I think as… as a solicitor you are… you’re working in an environment where you’re expected to know the answers, all the time. And coming into the digital environment, it was more about learning, and putting things to users and understanding what they’re telling us, rather than us telling them what they should know.

So, I think legal services and digital; I think it’s… it’s the future. I think it’s the way that legal services are going to be delivered mainstream, over the next sort of probably 5 to 10 years. I think at the moment there is limited routes to that online market. I think that plenty have tried and failed perhaps cos they’ve been offered a wholly digital service as opposed to a service where you get the benefits of the digital channel but it’s also backed up by some robust legal guidance and advice. And I think it’s that hybrid which is where the… the future of legal services lie; because it’s not just about accessibility, it’s about making sure that… that the right advice is being given. And secondly, and probably more importantly, that the customer feels that they are getting the service that’s of value to them and that they’re prepared to pay for it, and they feel that they’re protected, and that it’s something that is going to meet their needs.

Go to coop.co.uk/wills and find out more.