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Spring Events at Vanderbilt Law School – Program on Law & Innovation
It’s a busy week ahead for our Program on Law & Innovation at Vanderbilt Law School:
Wednesday, April 13, 12:00 – 1:00, internationally regarded legal industry commentator Richard Susskind will deliver the 2016 Victor S. Johnson Lecture to the Law School community on theme of the Future of the Legal Profession. The lecture is open tot he public.
Thursday, April 14, 8:30 – 9:45, Richard Susskind will deliver the second of his public lectures, this one on Artificial Intelligence and the Professions (based on his insightful new book on that theme). This lecture will kick off a CLE conference we have organized, Watson Esq., to explore in more detail the impacts and uses of artificial intelligence and other emerging data and computation technologies in legal practice. Speakers include leaders in the field.
Friday, April 15th, 8:30 – 3:00, we are holding an academic workshop on the Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence and Law, at which leading scholars and practitioners will discuss their work in the field.
And next week, Tuesday, April 19, 3:30 – 5:00, students in Adjunct Professor Marc Jenkins’ Technology in Legal Practice class will present their “apps” designed with area legal aid organizations to improve access to justice. A panel of judges will assess the apps. The presentations are open to the public and a reception will follow.
Can Humans End the Anthropocene?
There has been a great deal of buzz and attention in the science and policy communities over the idea that Earth has left the Holocene epoch and entered the Anthropocene, a proposed epoch that begins when human activities started to have a significant global impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. What is unique about the Anthropocene is that it is human-driven. We started it through the massive impacts our industry, resource extraction, agriculture, and sheer numbers have had on the biosphere. The question is whether we can end it, and if so, how and at what cost to humanity?
In a fascinating article in Science on this theme, Francois Sarrazin and Jane Lecomte outline five different scenarios for how humans handle the Antrhopocene based on how we treat our fellow species. In the most dystopian (for Earth) scenario, which they call the Blind Anthropocene, we give up on conservation of ecosystems and engage in runaway consumption to serve human needs only. In a range of three Deliberate Anthropocene scenarios, humans engage in conservation efforts, but for different goals. In the most human-focused scenario we conserve biodiversity to produce flows of provisioning (e.g., extracting timber) and regulating (e.g., wetlands providing sediment capture) ecosystem services benefitting human communities. An intermediate scenario adds protection of wilderness and landscapes, but only to enhance cultural (e.g., recreation) ecosystem services. In the most progressive Deliberate Anthropocene scenario, conservation is aimed at inter-generational fitness of humanity, which would focus on maintaining sustainable flows of regulating ecosystem services even at the expense of satisfying wants of present society.
Most environmental policy discourse focuses on which of these four scenarios, all of which are anthropocentric, should guide our decisions and actions. As Sarrazin and Lecomte argue, however, none of these approaches, not even the most aggressive Deliberate Anthropocene conservation scenario, will bring the Anthropocene to an end. They argue that a fifth scenario, which they call the Deliberate Overcoming of the Anthropocene, will be required. In this “evocentric” scenario, humans design conservation to ensure not only the fitness of future generations of humans, but also to ensure the future evolutionary fitness of all other species. Only if we can return other species to such an evolutionary trajectory—one not so influenced by human impacts—could we begin to entertain the idea that the Anthropocene is drawing to a close, thanks to us.
Their proposal is, to say the least, radical. What would it take to accomplish it? What laws and policies would we need to put in place now to start turning the Anthropocene around—to actually end rather than soften its impacts—and how long would it take? Is it even possible?
Regardless of its audacity, their proposal could prompt a useful thought exercise to test just how progressive even our most progressive conservation policies truly are. It could also provide a reference point for measuring how deeply entrenched the Anthropocene moves over time. It is at the very least worth thinking about.
Can AI Make AI Obey the Law?
Amitai Etzioni, the famous sociologist, and his son Oren Etzioni, the famous computer scientist, have posted an intriguing paper on SSRN, Keeping AI Legal. The paper starts by outlining some of the many legal issues that will spin out from the progression of artificial intelligence (AI) in cars, the internet, and countless other devices and technologies–what they call “smart instruments”–given the ability of the AI programming to learn as it carries out its mission. Many of these issues are familiar to anyone following the bigger AI debate–i.e., whether it is going to help us or kill us, on which luminaries have opined both ways–such as who is liable if an autonomous car runs off the road, or what if a bank loan algorithm designed to select for the best credit risks based purely on socially acceptable criteria (income, outstanding loans etc.) begins to discriminate based on race or gender. The point is, AI smart instruments could learn over time to do things and make decisions that make perfect sense to the AI but break the law. The article argues that, given this potential, we need to think more deeply about AI and “the legal order,” defined not just as law enforcement but also as including preventive measures.
This theme recalls a previous post of mine on “embedded law”–the idea that as more and more of our stuff and activities are governed by software and AI, we can program legal compliance into the code–for example, to make falsifying records or insider trading impossible. Similarly, the Etzionis argue that the operational AI of smart instruments will soon be so opaque and impenetrable as to be essentially a black box in terms of sorting out legal concerns like the errant car or the discriminatory algorithm. Ex ante human intervention to prevent the illegality will be impossible in many instances, because the AI is moving too fast (see my previous post on this theme), and ex post analysis of the liabilities will be impossible because we will not be able to recreate what the AI did.
The Etzionis’ solution is that we need “AI programs to examine AI programs,” which they call “AI Guardians.” These AI Guardians would “interrogate, discover, supervise, audit, and guarantee the compliance of operational AI programs.” For example, if the operational AI program of a bank called in a customer’s loan, the AI Guardian program would check to determine whether the operational program acted on improper information it had learned to obtain and assess. AI Guardians, argue the Etzionis, would be superior to humans given their speed, lower cost, and impersonal interface.
I get where they are coming from, but I see some problems. First of all, many determinations of legality of illegality depend on judgement calls–balancing tests, the reasonable person standard, etc. If AI Guardians are to make those calls, then necessarily they will need to be programmed to learn, which leads right back to the problem of operational AI learning to break the law. Maybe AI Guardians will learn to break the law too. Perhaps for those calls the AI Guardian could simply alert a human compliance officer to investigate, but then we’ve put humans back into the picture. So let’s say that the AI Guardians only enforce laws with bright line rules, such as don’t drive over 50mph. Many such rules have exceptions that require judgment to apply, however, so we are back to the judgment call problem. And if all the AI Guardians do is prevent violations of bright line rules with no exceptions, it’s not clear they are an example of AI at all.
But this is not what the Etzionis have in mind–they envision that “AI Guardians…will grow smarter just as operational AI programs do.” The trick will be to allow the AI Guardians to “grow smarter” but prevent the potential for them as well to cross the line. The Etzionis recognize this lurking “Who will guard the guardians” question exists even for their AI Guardians, and propose that all smart instruments have a “readily locatable off switch.” Before long, however, flipping the off switch will mean more than turning off the car–it will mean turning off the whole city!
All of this is yet more Law 2050 food for thought…
Our Grandchildren Redesigned, by Michael Bess – A Legal Futurism Treasure Chest
As you may have noticed (or if not, now you know), I haven’t posted anything on the site for a while. I have all the typical excuses: busy at work, family stuff, the holidays, etc. But truth be told, not much grabbed me. That changed when I read Our Grandchildren Redesigned, the latest by my Vanderbilt colleague and friend, historian Michael Bess. As a dabbler in legal futurism, Bess’s book is a treasure chest to me. The subtitle says it all: Life in the Bioengineered Society of the Near Future.
In Redesigned, Bess pulls off what others have tried but failed to deliver. Using what is known today about the past, present, and trajectory of pharmaceuticals, bioelectronics, and genetics and epigenetics (plus nanotechnology, AI, robotics, and synthetic biology), Bess constructs plausible scenarios of how humans will use these technologies to “improve” on our biology and how society will respond. There is no science fiction in the book, no extreme claims, no utopian or dystopian indulgence. Bess the careful, acclaimed historian has turned his sights on the bioengineered future with the same measured, thoughtful, methodical attention to detail and cogency. And one could spin an endless stream of questions about the law’s future from his scenarios, many of which Bess signals or even digs into.
Bess opens the book (and its ongoing website) with three premises. First, “It’s almost certainly going to happen.” By “it” he means the convergence of the technologies towards the capacity for human physical and mental engineering through drugs, biotech devices, and epigenetic manipulations. Lest there be any doubts, chapters two through five put them to rest. Second, “It will bring both opportunity and peril.” Sure, you might say, so have smartphones. So what? But third, “Its impact will be radical.” Of course, it’s this third of his premises that might attract the charge that it’s Bess who is being radical, but by the end of the book my only concern was that he didn’t play the scenario out as fully crazy as it could get!
I’m not going to review Bess’s account of the technologies or even the scenarios he builds in any detail. Read the book! Rather, what makes the book of such tremendous potential impact and of value to legal futurists is Bess’s engagement of the social and ethical choices that will have to be made as redesigning becomes possible, then practical, then popular, and eventually part of all our (grandchildren’s) lives. There are three big themes Bess develops in this regard.
First, this will not happen overnight. Many of the legal issues one can envision will flow from the transitional nature of the uploading of redesign technology into society. New technologies will at first be expensive, thus furthering already pervasive wealth disparities. Some technologies will need to begin at young ages to be effective, creating inter-generational disparities. Of course, responding to social disparity is nothing new to the law, but we are not talking about who can afford smartphones, we are talking about who gets the smart pills, the fully-functional artificial eye, the tweaked gene expression for holding off cancer, and so on. Bess’s concern is on target—the redesign disparity could begin to rip apart society as it comes online. How will law respond?
Second, Bess explores issues that will be inherent in the new normal in which a substantial level of redesign is eventually available to the masses. If the average age moves to 150, it takes little imagination to play out what that could mean for employment, marriage, welfare, the environment, prisons, you name it? And if people can be better at anything, with potentially vast improvement on the horizon, what does that mean for sports, warfare, science, the arts, you name it? Plus, in all likelihood we can’t become the bast at everything, so, much as children do today, we will likely see specializations that produce even more extreme differences between groups than are possible today. Will the best tennis players have anything in common with the best flutists? And what about people who, for moral or religious reasons, choose not to participate? What will we do with them? Lots of law change in store!
Third, Bess asks what we should do now to shape the new normal, if we can. Bess believes, and I agree, that getting control of the direction and intensity of redesign will be hard, but necessary. If the U.S. backs off on moral grounds (e.g., as with stem cell research), what’s to stop North Korea? And if we set international limits, domestic controls on private experimentation will need to be rigorous. And what would the limits look like? Bess suggests seven key challenges, including controlling radical inequality, defending mental privacy, and avoiding commodification of the human being. Again, law will have to be engaged.
I should emphasize that there is far more to Bess’s work than I have let on in this law-focused account. There is a profoundly philosophical dimension, as Bess asks early in the book whether we should redesign and then develops a set of human flourishing factors that he believes should guide our way. Bess animates his descriptive scenarios with short fictional vignettes of life and lives, and even some laws, in the redesign future. By no means corny or out of place, these allow the reader to personalize the impacts of a redesign future. In my case, I found myself drifting into thought about the legal future as well. In short, all I have hoped to do here is scratch the surface of Bess’s brilliant work to whet your Law 2050 appetites.
Bottom line, if you want to get a picture of how being a human will take a sharp turn by around 2050, Our Grandchildren Redesigned is your starting point.
Law 2050 Student Research Topics – From Anti-Ageing Drugs to Mind Uploading and Beyond
We’re at that stage in my Law 2050 class when the fun really begins!
One of the themes of the class is that young attorneys need to be far more entrepreneurial these days than was the case even a decade ago. Each year I challenge my students to identify an “outside the law” technological, social, economic, environmental, or other trend and build a scenario around it to anticipate its future legal implications. They use their selected topic to work through three types of business development writing: a blog post, client alert letter, and bar journal article. This kind of exercise develops the skill set needed to find opportunities around emerging trends, such as drones. Indeed, to set the example I invited James Mackler, an attorney with Frost Brown Todd’s Nashville office who over the past two years has built a national practice around the legal issues associated with private use of drones, to explain to the class how he took an idea and evolved it from scratch into a new legal opportunity–a practice that would not have been on anyone’s mind five years ago. His presentation inspired many of my students to think big about how they can spot trends and develop expertise to project to peers and clients through writing, presentations, and other business development opportunities.
As in previous years, the student topics span a wide variety of trends and themes. In coming weeks, in addition to the writing assignments each student will have a few minutes to give the class an “elevator pitch” about their topic. I’m looking forward to learning about:
- AirBnb
- organic seed technology
- 3D printing of drugs, organs, and food
- virtually reality technology
- designer babies
- mind uploading
- the IP of cannabis
- e-cig litigation
- off-grid battery storage
- driverless cars
- brain scan advancements in concussion detection
- facial recognition software
- bitcoins and block chain technology
- micro payments
- synthetic meat
- wearable technologies
- daily fantasy leagues
- smart clothes
- anti-ageing drugs
- litigation funding
- virtual medical consulting
- artificial heart advancements
- AI robot ethics
- mega franchising
- music streaming
- fracking
- robotic surgery
- biostamps
- genetic engineering
There’s gotta be some future billable hours in there somewhere!
Legal Technology through the Ages – Why Didn’t They Dread It Then?
As covered extensively in my Law 2050 posts, many legal industry commentators believe legal technology will undergo amazing advancements in the next decade as the combination of big data, machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence bears down on law. I’m one of them! But many also dread this disruptive prospect, worrying that it will eat away at billable hours and replace many lawyer functions with machines.
Advancements in legal technology are nothing new. Lexis and Westlaw surged onto the scene in the early 1980s to offer all sorts of better, faster, more accurate ways of conducting legal research. Law was teching up before then, and has been ever since. Did the lawyers of those early law+tech days dread the onslaught of computers, software, the internet, and all the other new gizmos? Not as far as I can tell.
Browsing through past issues of the ABA Journal offers a revealing and often humorous glimpse into the past of law+tech. Indeed, perhaps the best way to trace the history of legal technology is through the journal’s advertising pages.
I could not find any evidence of ads for legal technology prior to 1950, likely because legal technology before then consisted of a typewriter and a telephone, and not much was happening with either. The February 1953 issue, however, contains an ad for the Autograph, a contraption that allowed a lawyer to record dictation and conversations. Remington also placed an ad for a compact typewriter. Now we’re talking!
The March 1960 issue contained ads announcing the invention of the transistor (by Bell) and touting the advantages of new inventions like Edison “portable” dictating machine, the Voicecaster speaker phone, and the Thermofax copier capable of churning out one page every 4 seconds!
The January 1969 issue contained just one technology ad, for the Friden “automatic writing machine.” This contraption made a “paper tape” copy of what was typed, thus spelling “the beginning of the end of the typewriter.” What’s “paper tape”?
Most of this technology posed no threat to the demand for lawyers’ time and wisdom—it was mostly about convenience and speeding up clerical work. In the April 1974 issue, however, Wang announced its 1200 Cassette Typewriter, which because of its simplification of editing was billed as “giving you more time to be a lawyer.” Of course, assuming that lawyers previously billed their editing time, this also meant (by today’s reasoning) that the new machine would cut into lawyer billings. But I can’t find any evidence that lawyers thought that way then.
Jumping forward to the June 1983 issue—on the cusp of the office computer age—one finds scads of law+tech ads for products to improve office management, but also some offering to change the way lawyers do their work. The Prentice-Hall Phinet, for example, put all of their loose leaf tax news service into a searchable software package touted as “a new concept in tax research” that would “revolutionize your tax practice” (never mind that the dedicated terminal was the size of a small fridge). West also introduced its Instacite service. This trend continued through the 1980s. For example, in the June 1988 issue, along with gobs of ads for practice management software, Matthew Bender announced its complete bankruptcy practice software designed to simplify document drafting and assembly and other tasks normally performed by a lawyer.
Interestingly, by the February 1999 issue, most of these ads had disappeared, with Lexis and Westlaw being the only law+tech entries offering to help lawyers be lawyers. Lexis and Westlaw have continued to dominate law+tech advertising in the journal, but more recently other products have entered the fray, such as Bloomberg BNA, Fastcase, and others familiar to today’s practitioners.
What’s more interesting, though, is that none of the prior waves of law+tech were greeted with the kind of dread one hears today, including in the pages of the ABA Journal. Although I have not systematically researched the journal, only three articles mention the term “legal technology” prior to 1990, whereas it became a consistent theme by the mid-1990s.
Why did lawyers of the past (well, I’m one of them!) not dread Lexis, Westlaw, the conversion of paper to online, the internet, Google, and all the other technologies that made practicing law more efficient and effective? Why is there so much dread today? One answer may be that the legal market in the 1970-2005 time period was an ever-expanding universe, so it really was a good thing to be freed of the tediousness of research, document drafting, and so on. Being more efficient did not mean fewer billable hours. Today that’s different.
But I think it runs deeper than that–it’s existential. The current evolution of law+tech threatens to cut into not just billable time, but the essence of what it is to be a lawyer. The profession is being forced to reexamine itself and make sense of the possibility that even more of what was in the lawyer’s domain can be done by a machine.
Ultimately, though, my prediction is that lawyers will come around to appreciating what Wang offered as solace for its 1200 Cassette Typewriter many decades ago: the law+tech advancements we will see over the next decade will “give you more time to be a lawyer.” Having slogged through endless document reviews and research rabbit trails as a young lawyer in the 1980s, I think that’s a good thing!
Law 2050 Law Firm and In-House Leader Panels Offer Insights to My Students
My Law 2050 class is off to a fast start. The highlight to kick off the class each year has been two panels, one of law firm leaders followed by the other of in-house leaders, to open a deep discussion of the legal services industry in these post-normal times. As in years past, this year’s panels hit on many themes of the class. Some of the memorable comments and responses from panelists follow below. By now anyone working this space will find these self-explanatory, insightful, and real. Many thanks to my panelists for taking time out of their busy schedules to share these with the students.
Law Firm Leaders: Perry Brandt of Bryan Cave, Matt Burnstein of Waller Lansden, and Andrea Farley of Troutman Sanders
- We are never going back to the way it was
- Law firms need to double-down on technology and innovation
- Develop expertise in emerging areas
- These forces affect different firms in different ways
- Comparison is the thief of joy
- Partner mobility has changed the culture
- The bigger the client, the more they want to see legal project management
- We no longer hold the keys to the kingdom
- BigLaw is a work in progress
- BigLaw is not easy
In-house Leaders: Julie Ortmeier of Carfax, Wade Turner of Academy Sports, and Leslie Zmugg of Caterpillar Financial
- Success is a business result, not a lawyering result. Attorneys who say they get that but don’t are a dime a dozen
- I don’t want a memo; I want an answer
- The make-or-buy environment is changing
- I have yet to find an alternative fee arrangement that saves me money
- The majority of law firms’ future clients are their present associates
- Law firms need to develop a business model so that 1st and 2nd year associates don’t feel billing pressure
- I am no longer hesitant to jump firms if I am not happy
- In litigation, e-discovery costs drive the fight-or-settle decision far more than lawyer costs
- It’s not always easy to outsource. There is no universal playbook, and the core of a matter often cannot be outsourced
- The amount of lawyering that is truly unique is about 10 percent. There is room for the computer scientists to move in on the rest
And last but not least–
- We are ripe for disruption
Indeed!
LAW 2050 – Round III (with kudos to law firm Bryan Cave for thinking creatively)
One sure way to put a damper on blog posting is to spend a month in Venice, Italy, which I had the pleasure of doing this June and never thought once about Law 2050. But now it’s back to reality and a top priority is planning and scheduling the third offering of my Law 2050 class this fall semester here at Vanderbilt Law School. We already have great speakers lined up with more to be scheduled.
As I was putting the schedule together today and thinking about new ideas for the class, serendipity struck in the form of an email from Perry Brandt, a Vandy Law alum and managing partner of the Kansas City office of Bryan Cave (and a speaker in this fall’s class). He sent a link to a Chicago Lawyer story about one of the most innovative initiatives I have seen any major law firm take to embrace the Post-Normal times: They flew 100 associates from around their offices to a two-day boot camp in which they tasked their pool of future partners to redesign the firm for the future. I encourage you to read the full story so won’t try to summarize it here other than to offer this snippet to give you the gist:
The firm’s message was clear: These young associates are entering a business on the brink of profound change brought on by technology and shifting economics. The future depends on their ability to adapt. And partners need to learn to listen and empower them. Toward that end, the firm held a “hack-a-thon” in which associate groups presented ideas for technologies that would aid their practice. The firm promised to spend $10,000 developing the winning idea.
Against a backdrop of illustrations from the two-day conference, associates applaud a group’s hack-a-thon pitch. One illustration reads: “Rise of the MACHINE. ” Nearby, an associate daydreams at his desk: “What business are we actually in?” Photo by Karen Elshout.
There was much more than that to the event, including a presentation by Bruce MacEwen, the New York-based law firm consultant who writes the blog Adam Smith, Esq., titled “The Rise of the Machine,” and what appears to have been meaningful interaction between firm leaders and the assembled associates.
Kudos to Bryan Cave for not just “getting it,” but doing something meaningful about it by investing in and empowering their young attorneys. I’m planning on adapting the idea to my Law 2050 class.
And with that, Round III of Law 2050 is off and running. More posts to follow!
How Big Is NewLaw?
When asked to give examples of new business models of legal practice in the US, Axiom is likely to be near the top of anyone’s list. But how long is the list–how big is NewLaw? A recent paper exploring that question suggests the answer is, not very long, but long enough to take note.
The paper summarizes research by Hastings Law School Professor and WorkLife Law Center Director Joan Williams with Center Fellow Jessica Lee and Berkeley Sociology PhD student Aaron Platt. They describe the project as
the first attempt at a comprehensive review of a wide variety of new business organizations that have arisen in recent years to remedy the market’s failure to deliver business organizations responsive to the complaints of either lawyers or of clients.
The “New Models of Legal Practice” described here typically offer a new value proposition for lawyers and clients. For lawyers, New Models offer better work-life balance and more control over other aspects of their work lives—in exchange for which lawyers typically (though not invariably) shoulder more risk, giving up a guaranteed salary, to be paid instead only for the hours they work. For clients, New Models typically drive down legal fees by sharply diminishing overhead through elimination of expensive real estate and the high cost of training new lawyers, and (again) dispensing with guaranteed salaries.
They break the New Models universe into five categories:
1) Secondment Firms place lawyers in house, typically to work at a client site either on a temporary basis or part-time (typically a few days a week). Some consist exclusively of senior lawyers who can function either as general counsel or as regional heads of legal departments in very large companies, while others place more junior lawyers to help with overflow work from in-house departments.
2) Law & Business Advice Companies combine legal advice with general business advice of the type traditionally provided by management consulting firms, and/or help clients with investment banking as well as legal needs.
3) Law Firm Accordion Companies assemble networks of curated lawyers available to enable law firms to accordion up to meet short-term staffing needs. Typically these networks are women lawyers who work short part-time hours (10-20 hours a week.) Attorneys are paid only for the hours they work.
4) Virtual Law Firms and Companies typically drive down overhead by having attorneys work from their own homes—and again dispense with a guaranteed salary, allowing attorneys to work as little or as much as they wish. These organizations vary a lot: some are very similar to traditional law firms, while others are companies in which many of the functions traditionally performed by lawyers, notably rainmaking, are the province of the company owners.
5) Innovative Law Firms and Companies include the widest variety of different business models. The single most innovative is a company with a new monetization model—providing legal services in return for a monthly subscription fee—which allows attorneys to work in a sophisticated legal practice on an 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. schedule, little or no weekend work, and three weeks’ unplugged vacation per year. Other innovative law firms change key elements of the traditional law firm model in ways that allow for better work-life balance and also have one or more of the following elements: alternative fee arrangements, team scheduling, elimination of the partner/associate distinction and “rainmaking” requirements.
After scouring the industry for these new models, the authors found only eight Secondment Firms, two Law & Business firms, five Law Firm Accordion Companies, eleven Virtual Law Firms, and eighteen Innovative Law Firms. That’s 44 total entities out there providing legal talent under a business model substantially different from the traditional law firm model. As the authors’ detailed summaries of each model reveal, some of these operations are quite large, like Axiom, and some are small.
So what’s the take home message? On the one hand, it’s unlikely that the Am Law 100, with combined revenues in 2014 of over $80 billion, are looking over their shoulders in fear of the NewLaw disruption. On the other hand, that’s 44 more entities in the NewLaw space than existed a decade ago. Also bear in mind that the lawyers in these entities are truly practicing law, or close to it (Axiom insists in tiny print it is not a law practice) rather than operating exclusively as consultancies, outsourcing firms, or online legal document providers (all of which are growing sectors of the legal industry as well). Given the practice model constraints imposed by US bar regulation, it’s impressive to see this many entities pushing the envelope. How far this trend can go without UK-like regulatory acceptance of alternative law practice business models remains to be seen, by my guess is that the drivers that led to these 44 firms forging the NewLaw universe are not going away, ever, which suggests the number will continue to grow regardless.
Vanderbilt Law Students Build Apps for Access to Justice
Yesterday afternoon five groups of Vanderbilt Law students compellingly demonstrated the power of legal technology to deliver access to justice. The students were part of an innovative class Adjunct Professor Marc Jenkins developed to bring technology directly into the law school classroom. In addition to receiving a sweeping overview of the law+tech scene through guest speakers and class discussion, over the course of the semester the students teamed up with Neota Logic to develop legal expert applications designed to assist five different public interest legal services organizations in their work. The student groups worked closely with their paired organizations to identify a need and design solutions using the Neota Logic platform. Each of the applications focused on providing efficiency to free up more time for lawyers to provide legal advice. The student groups presented their applications at yesterday’s event to a panel of four judges representing a broad swath of the legal industry (legal tech, in-house, law firm, law faculty) and an audience of over 30 interested students, faculty, and community members. The presentations were fabulous, and the judges and audience offered sound advice and probing questions.
The five organizations and the student-designed apps:
- Tennessee Justice Center – App to assist pro bono lawyers in navigating the TennCare medical denial appeals process. Features include a decision tree to walk the lawyer through the appeals process, links to guidance, sample pleadings, and cross-examination questions, and provides tips for investigating the fact background.
- Tennessee Justice for Our Neighbors – App to help users determine their DACA immigration eligibility. With only two staff attorneys serving a population of tens of thousands of potentially eligible people, this app reduces intake time and helps filter out those who are clearly ineligible. The app interviews the user, alerts the user to necessary documentation, and produces a report for the user and the organization to facilitate the initial client meeting.
- Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands – App to help users determine their foreclosure relief status based on timing of events and other relevant factors. The app interviews the user to help the organization determine where the user is on the foreclosure timeline and what information the user has received.
- Tennessee Alliance for Legal Services – App to help TALS match low-income users not eligible for legal aid with appropriate legal service lawyers and organizations in the state. The app interviews the user to determine the nature of their legal problem and assists them in taking steps to secure initial legal advice.
- Nashville Arts and Business Council – App to help artists of all kinds in the Nashville area identify the appropriate business entity form for their ventures. The app produces a report that the user and NABC staff can use to start the process.
Many thanks to Marc Jenkins for designing and delivering this truly exciting new course, and hats off to the students for rising to the law+tech challenge so successfully! More of this to come at the Vanderbilt Program on Law & Innovation!
Law 2050 