| One of the most salutary responses to the ambition of bringing "digital transformation" to the legal industry comes from PaulG himself: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1384422654195683328 > In 2008 I spent a month writing a web-based system for managing all YC's funding documents. With one click you could get an instance of the latest docs, prepopulated with all the startup's info from our database. The lawyers quietly ignored it and kept using Microsoft Word. Others have said in the comments that doctors and lawyers are "the last, most powerful guilds" remaining. On the one hand, it's easy to call for "the end of lawyers". (The Legalese website says that sort of thing as a provocation, a way of staking a flag in the sand.) On the other, it's likely that society will always define a special role for the white-collar warrior, the champion of the courtroom; for high-stakes, once-in-a-lifetime situations, you want expert human hand-holding. In books like https://www.amazon.com/Future-Professions-Technology-Transfo... Richard Susskind offers a more nuanced middle ground. Look at medicine: together, the Apple Watch, WebMD, DirectLabs, home glucose monitors, and home blood pressure monitors (let us never miss an opportunity to say "sphygmomanometer") allow millions of people to do for themselves what they used to need a doctor for. In turn, that lets doctors focus on more high-value work. Suppose we distinguish quantitative and qualitative reasoning: numbers belong to the former; legal and logical problem-solving to the latter. Quantitative reasoning went in-house when spreadsheets (the original killer app) landed on the PC: now millions of people do for themselves what a couple of generations ago used to be the domain of the accountant, the bookkeeper, the finance specialist. What would "spreadsheets for law" look like? If tools emerge that allow laypeople at home and in business to explore for themselves simple questions like "what is the deadline for me to do X", "what things am I required to prepare ahead of that deadline", and "how do I get out of doing Y", frankly the lawyers might breathe a sigh of relief so they don't have to keep annoying people by answering "it depends". There's plenty of low-hanging fruit out there like that which makes people's lives better. Software like docassemble.org and startups like afterpattern.com are exploring these possibilities. Farther into the science-fiction future, researchers in France did a lovely demo, basically fuzzing the tax code to find a sploit that deserved to be patched. https://blog.merigoux.fr/en/2019/12/20/taxes-formal-proofs.h... One final point: people who argue for the necessity of discretion and the desirability of vagueness and ambiguity tend to have, in the past, benefited from such discretion. But there are less privileged people out there who have been on the sharp receiving end of discretion, and they might prefer a little less discretion and a little more algorithmic, explainable, deterministic fairness! |