Before I was a barrister, I was (briefly) a management consultant. I didn’t progress very far, but some things from my previous life impressed themselves on me.

There was a relentless emphasis on efficiency – on avoiding unnecessary effort, and maximising output for your time. Reinventing what somebody else had already done was verboten. If you had to do something more than once, you were expected to build – and share – a reusable tool.

And every project ran on Excel – so I started to develop a particularly nerdy hobby of running my own life through spreadsheets.

When I came to the Bar, as a personal injury and employment specialist, I again found repetitive number-work: multipliers, interest, fixed costs, grossing up. But I was staggered to find them being done with pencil, paper and pocket calculator.

I found this approach as mind-numbingly dull as it was time-consuming and error-prone. So I started making little spreadsheets. I built one for interest. Then one for multipliers, and for uprating PSLA awards for inflation.

Things snowballed from there. A couple of calculators grew to around two dozen; an emailed file to a few mates led to a regular email around the whole of Chambers.

I’ve now put my entire curated collection online, for the whole legal community, at www.dgcalculators.co.uk.

 

There are 40 calculators on the site now, organised into five areas: personal injury, civil costs, employment, industrial disease, and a small set of general utilities.

Each does a single, specific task, but quickly, consistently, and correctly. Every calculator has a deliberately simple, intuitive design, so the workflow is obvious for even the biggest technophobe. Every calculator includes a ‘show working’ panel, setting out the computation steps in full. Sources – such as the Ogden Tables, or the ONS’s inflation indices – are directly referenced.

There’s also a ‘scratchpad’ panel, to collect results and notes, and an actual, literal calculator for your one-off calculations.

I’m also adding new calculators all the time. The current collection of 40 individual calculators is just the start. The aim is to serve every need of the busy civil lawyer (or at least, those which can be served mathematically).

I’m currently working on a Schedule Auditor, which should land in a few months: for an additional premium subscription, users can paste lines from the opposing party’s schedule, and the tool assesses it to give a red/amber/green verdict in seconds. There’s a waitlist sign-up at dgcalculators.co.uk/audit.

I was never attracted by the idea of having a tool to build my Schedules for me: I always wanted control of my documents. DG Calculators doesn’t replace the lawyer, it supports them. It’s an indispensable toolbox to have open in a tab, whether you’re drafting a Schedule of Loss, sitting in court, or deep in a contentious settlement meeting. Your analysis and judgement can never be replaced, but routine computation absolutely can be automated.

 

The site is available for individuals, or for sets, firms and other organisations. Individual subscriptions are £15.99 per month or £159 annually (ex VAT), which is less than Netflix premium. Corporate subscriptions are billed per seat on a tiered model, but the largest organisations can get access for as little as £29 per seat.

Curious lawyers can try one calculator (the basic-lookup ‘multiplier getter’) for free, and sign up for a 14-day, no-commitment trial at dgcalculators.co.uk.