alt.legal: Stanford’s FutureLaw 2015 – Literally With Robots (And RoboCops)
Technological change is coming to the legal profession, and those that embrace it (and understand it) will prosper.
Pop quiz – where can you find legal entrepreneurs, celebrities, and free-roaming robotic columns? At the Stanford Law CodeX FutureLaw Conference, of course (as if it wasn’t obvious). Last week, for the second year in a row, I flew out to beautiful Palo Alto to attend Standford Law’s CodeX FutureLaw conference. CodeX is the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics (think computers and law), and it strives to promote progress in legal technology.
The event was crawling with Biglaw lawyers, technologists, and law professors, but it was especially the place to be for alt.legal entrepreneurs. The established leaders in the alt.legal world were in attendance and filled the speaking panels — hailing from companies focused on everything from legal search (Thomson Reuters and Ravel Law), to legal marketplaces (Avvo), to online legal form companies (Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom), to legal process outsourcing (my company, Pangea3).
Wandering around the event (along with us geeks) were free-roaming, robotic columns, through which you could video chat with legal-tech celebrities, including Jonathan Zittrain, Primavera de Filippi, Greg Lambert, Vitalik Buterin, Nehal Madhani, Peter Neufeld and Harry Surden. If you are having trouble picturing these robotic monstrosities, try to visualize the spawn of a Segway and an iPad … running FaceTime. I personally long for the day that we lawyers are permitted by the ABA to command these robotic monsters to show up for us in court — while we lounge at home, eating cheese in a coat and tie, and not wearing any pants. Progress.
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The key theme that ran through the event was that technological change is coming to the legal profession, and those that embrace it (and understand it) will prosper. As CodeX fellow and keynote speaker Oliver Goodenough wrote in the Huffington Post, and echoed at the conference, “The impact of technology on law is moving forward with all the subtlety of a charging rhinoceros, transforming traditional practice and spawning new forms of ‘legal service’ delivery.”
Many believed that the change would be dramatic. In fact, one CodeX Fellow, Jerry Kaplan (serial entrepreneur, inventor, scientist, and author), asserted his firm believes that 80-90% of legal work would be made redundant by computers. While he didn’t give me an exact time frame, I have since increased my 401K contribution and cut down to two Starbucks coffees per day to prepare financially for this upcoming armageddon.
This Year’s Game Changer – Computational Law
While I was a speaker in 2014, this year I was there to see the real action backstage via my Above The Law “press pass” (I didn’t actually have one, but definitely should have, right?). At a special press briefing I got to meet and greet the key CodeX Directors and Fellows and listen to what they were most excited about in the world of legal technology. Alongside me were reporters from local media, major publications such as Bloomberg, and of course, BuzzFeed.
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The topic at hand was Computational Law, and our guide was Michael Genesereth, a real heavyweight and a fascinating speaker. Genesereth raised ideas which were totally new to me, even after years in the alternative legal world as a writer and businessman.
The idea of computational law is the mechanization of legal analysis, and the use of embedded computer systems that allow laypeople to obtain accurate legal results without the need for lawyers as guides or translators. We already leverage computational law every time we use tax software like Turbo Tax, which encodes the tax law into the program and allows us to follow voluminous legal code without any guidance from actual tax lawyers. In essence, Turbo Tax interactively applies the law to your tax situation. This is very different from predictive coding in e-discovery, where machine learning assists lawyers in practicing more efficiently but does not autonomously apply the law to what it uncovers. This is also different than, say, LegalZoom, which provides forms and pre-constructed templates. Computational law is machine-powered legal application.
Genesereth walked us through three CodeX projects designed to explore this potential, embedding existing laws and rules into usable computer programs. One early CodeX project — called Project Calc — sought to integrate existing construction laws (including local building codes, federal environmental rules and accessibility laws such as the ADA) into computer-aided building design programs used by architects. If perfected, architects won’t need to miraculously become experts in local rules. Instead, they can receive automatic alerts by the design program itself when their artistic vision violates existing law. This seems like a clear win for computational law.
As with all progress, there is also a dark side to computational law, which Genesereth referred to as “The Cop In The Backseat” (not to be confused with “Junk In The Trunk”). We already have the technology to put a virtual cop in the backseat of your car, to find out when you are speeding, turning illegally, or even driving drunk. Depending on how we want to unleash this technology, we could create a virtual “good cop,” who warns you when you are breaking the law and then sends you on your way, or a virtual “bad cop,” with zero tolerance for your shenanigans. One could foresee how this lands us only a stone’s throw away from a RoboCop or, if combined with predictive analytics, a Minority Report scenario.
But whether you see these bleeding-edge technologies as a blessing or a curse, it’s easy to envision a world where the application and enforcement of many laws will be consistent and automatic – and completely human-free. With these advances will surely come a new wave of legal entrepreneurs, making the legal system more efficient and making a nice living for themselves along the way.
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Joe Borstein is a Global Director at Thomson Reuters’ award-winning legal outsourcing company, Pangea3, which employs over 1,000 full-time attorneys across the globe. He and his co-author Ed Sohn each spent over half a decade as associates in Biglaw and were classmates at Penn Law.
Joe manages a global team dedicated to counseling law firm and corporate clients on how to best leverage Pangea3’s full-time attorneys to improve legal results, cut costs, raise profits, and have a social life. He is a frequent speaker on global trends in the legal industry and, specifically, how law firms are leveraging those trends to become more profitable. If you are interested in entrepreneurship and the delivery of legal services, please reach out to Joe directly at joe.borstein@thomsonreuters.com.
