alt.legal: How To Hack The Law, According To Morpheus

What? Hack the law? Like, in public? In broad daylight? Is that legal?

If the legal industry today is the Matrix, which character would you be?
Oh, we are Morpheus. Definitely.

I spent 30 minutes with Morpheus Phil Weiss, founder of a group of over a thousand lawyers, policymakers, and technologists that meet up in bars, cafes, and creative workspaces from Brooklyn to San Francisco to Stockholm. They call their group Legal Hackers, and its mission is to hack the law.

What? Hack the law? Like, in public? In broad daylight? Is that legal?

“We call it extra-legal mechanisms. Not illegal. Extra-legal.” Weiss, a good-natured young lawyer (Brooklyn Law ’12, associate at Friedman Law Group), had the savvy of a well-read academic but the easygoing manner of a millennial.

So, extra-legal, huh? But “hacking the law” was still a bizarre concept for me. “Look,” Weiss patiently explained as my brain struggled to grasp the vision, “we just bring technologists and lawyers together to explore and create solutions at the intersection of law and technology.”

I started to understand. We’re not just talking about alternative career paths for lawyers; we’re talking about paradigm-shifting innovation to re-terraform the stodgy, old-school legal industry. We’re talking about a movement, a framework.

So let’s hack the law… whatever that means.

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Legal Hackers is just one example in a sprawling underground of nascent legal innovation, where those late-night genius ideas, combined with collaboration, Red Bull, and sources of capital, give birth to fledgling legal startups. These motley crews are gaining a serious head of steam and they’re ready to get called up to the big show. It’s like Cobain and Novoselic, pre-Nevermind.

So here’s how it works for Legal Hackers: hacking the law means finding solutions or improvements on an area of law where legislation or the courts may fail or are otherwise impracticable. Legal Hackers accomplishes this through a series of meetups and events, fostering dialog and putting together discussion panels.

And, most importantly, it happens through “hackathons.” Hackathons provide a focus on an area of law in need of improvement and then fling techies and legal professionals together, Hadron Collider-style, for a day or two of brainstorming and productive chaos. The winning teams are awarded a cash prize for the solution that best presents a hacked solution to the legal issue.

In its short history, Legal Hackers has held hackathons and events around addressing online piracy, revenge porn, net neutrality (“How do we hack the universe that we’re in?” Weiss ruminated in a deep cosmic moment. “It’s a metaphysical question.”), and data privacy.

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The next Legal Hackers hackathon, Code the Deal, is being held next week, and it focuses on how to hack transactional legal practice with technology solutions. “The goal is to make the job of transactional counsel easier, by addressing a specific problem for transactional counsel and just solving it.” Hackathons in non-legal arenas can give birth to new businesses, and although new businesses have not emerged yet from Legal Hackers hackathons, Weiss expects that there may be some in the coming months.

The hackathons mix a reality-show dynamic with a lab experiment. “It’s competitive because we’re all competing for the same pot of money,” Weiss noted, “but it’s collaborative because these teams are not very formal. People are breaking off to other teams left and right — we’re using the same beds of open source code in a lot of cases, people are exchanging ideas, and maybe they decide they want to join a different team mid-stream. Under pressure, this builds great ideas.”

Events with groups like this are going to play a crucial role for the future of legal innovation. The innovation and flipping-the-script ethos is second nature to them. For instance, in my thirty minutes with Weiss, we managed to agree that robots would make good sitting corporate board members, contracts were an obsolete instrument that could be replaced with an app, and civil procedure is a waste of law school tuition. And we somehow found time to congratulate Angelina Jolie on her past inspiration and recent successes. Thinking creatively and undermining convention is just second nature to Weiss.

In a world replete with red tape and conference calls, it seems totally sensible, productive, and even efficient to throw people together with a common goal and watch what happens. As you know, taking a risk and stepping out into an alternative legal service or technology is what Joe Borstein and I stand for.

“It’s up to the members to make it happen,” Weiss declared, with none of Morpheus’s overimportance. “We show you the red and the blue pill. That’s who we are.”

What do you think? Red pill or blue pill? Comment below or drop me a line.


Ed Sohn is a Global Director at Thomson Reuters’ award-winning legal outsourcing company, Pangea3, which employs approximately 1,000 full-time attorneys across the globe. He and his co-author Joe Borstein each spent over half a decade as associates in Biglaw and were classmates at Penn Law.

Ed spent over two years at Pangea3’s largest office in New Delhi, India, training and managing hundreds of Indian attorneys, technologists, and business professionals, providing high-value litigation support. He now focuses on developing and delivering integrated technology and outsourcing solutions. Ed frequently speaks and writes on best practices in e-discovery processes and technology. Prior to joining Pangea3, Ed was an associate at King & Spalding LLP, representing clients in business litigation and government investigations. You can contact Ed about e-discovery, managed legal services, theology, chess, Star Trek The Next Generation, or the Chicago Bulls at edward.sohn@thomsonreuters.com.

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