Inventors Will Lead the Legal Future not Licensees

pic for frankie articleDavid McCullough’s The Wright Brothers serves as an ideal case study on the requirements to innovate; a desire to learn, perseverance, and work ethic. I read it in route to a wonderful opportunity to serve as visiting lecturer for Professor and Parsons Behle & Latimer attorney Randy Dryer’s innovative Technology and Modern Litigation course at the University of Utah’s S.J., Quinney College of Law. Courses like Professor Dryer’s at Utah and programs such as Stanford University’s CodeX, Vanderbilt’s Program on Law and Innovation, and the eDiscovery Institute and Review Center at Samford University’s Cumberland College of Law will ensure that the future generations of lawyers are prepared to solve 21st century legal problems and race with technology rather than unsuccessfully running against it.

While not as well known as Stanford and MIT, the history of modern computing and the digital revolution cannot be written without mentioning the U of U.  It was one of the first four nodes of the Internet and was widely recognized as the best computer graphics program in the country at that time.  Its influence continues today through its Master’s of Entertainment Arts & Engineering, widely recognized as the #1 graduate game development program in the United States and billion dollar tech companies Vivint, Ancestry.com, Qualtrics, Domo and Omniture that call the nearby Silicon Slopes home. Famous alumni of the U of U computer science department include Nolan Bushnell , founder of Atari; Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar; Jim Clark, founder of Netscape; John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe; and Alan Kay of Xerox PARC.   Bushnell first employed Steve Jobs. Jobs’ time at Pixar started his renaissance. And it was Jobs visit to Alan Kay at Xerox PARC where he witnessed Kay’s graphical user interface.  Kay famously remarked, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Wilbur and Orville Wright never had a pilot’s license.  Gutenberg never possessed a German manufacturing permit.  Sam Walton did not have a Master’s in supply chain management. Larry Page and Sergey Brin never took a course on search engine monetization.  A legal education is a tremendous asset but no guarantor of success. There are over 1 million licensed attorneys in the United States.  Yet, surveys show that approximately 80% of U.S. citizens choose to forego hiring a lawyer when a legal need arises.  Despite this clear access to justice problem and legal services opportunity, law school and the legal profession no longer look like such a good deal in a world made increasingly complex by regulation, globalization and democratized information.  Lawyers face competition in a flat revenue environment from LPOs, legal technology companies, in-sourcing, and a plethora of new business models designed to capitalize on where the digital world is going.  The threats are real but in the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity.

Entrepreneurial minded attorneys combining critical thinking skills obtained through legal education and practice with the ability to solve problems creatively like an engineer will find opportunities abounding in the areas of data privacy, cyber-security, drones, legal analytics, self-driving vehicles, the Internet of Things and a whole host of novel legal problems to be created due to technological and societal change. The headwinds will be strong but the future bright for those who wish to take flight and observe as Wilbur Wright did, “that no bird soars in a calm.”

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