Reinvent Law – Silicon Valley Conference
I’m heading out later this week to the Reinvent Law Silicon Valley Conference, which is shaping up to be a crash course in the current state of flux in the legal profession and the opportunities it presents. The schedule is packed with talks by key players in the transformation, such as the founder of Axiom Law, and people following it, such as Bill Henderson of Indiana Law School. One of its organizers, Dan Katz of Michigan State University Law School, explains that topics will include “LegalTechStartUp, Lawyer Regulation, Quantitative Legal Prediction, Legal Supply Chain, Project Management, Technology Aided Access to Justice, Design, 3D-Printing, Driverless Cars, Business of Law, Legal Education, Legal Information Engineering, New Business Models for Law, Lean Lawyering, Augmented Reality, Legal Process Outsourcing, Big Data, New Markets for Law, Virtual Law Practice, E-Discovery, Information Visualization, E-Discovery, Legal Entrepreneurship, Legal Automation … and much more.” Coming on the heels of the Georgetown Center for the Study of the Legal Profession’s 2013 Report on the State of the Legal Market, which confirms the trends seen in the past few years are deeply rooted, the Reinvent Law conference is worth checking out. I will provide a summary and assessment when I return.
Today’s Lawyers Should Read Tomorrow’s Lawyers
Pundits lately have made a sport of piling on the legal services industry, making no effort to hide their glee in predicting the end of the world of lawyers as we have known it. A voice of clarity in that cacophony has been Richard Susskind, who, while predicting the end of lawyering as we have known it, has done so methodically and with an eye toward predicting the possibilities that come from the industry’s transformation. Any lawyer who has not read his past works, and even lawyers who have, should read his latest book, Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future.
Tomorrow’s Lawyers is a compact synthesis and update of Susskind’s previous works on the transformation of the legal industry, a short read filled with some valuable insights and suggestions. The primary targets of his study are the prototypical large corporate law firm and in-house law department. His basic approach is to (1) unpack transactional and litigation legal services into their discrete components; (2) put those components up against the disruptive economic and technological forces at play now and in the foreseeable future; (3) examine which of the legal services components are likely to come under pressure to be downsized, outsourced, price reduced, etc.; and (4) predict a new structure of the legal services industry coming out of that process, including new employment opportunities for lawyers.
As a former BigLaw partner who has been in full-time legal education the past 18 years, much of what Susskind describes resonates with my experience and my sense of where the legal practice is headed. I don’t agree with everything he says in the book, but I agree with most of it and believe it would be a useful read for senior partners, in-house general counsel, new lawyers, and, of greatest interest to me, law students. Even if you don’t agree with his predictions of where the legal services industry is headed, his descriptions of the components of legal services and the disruptive forces acting on the industry are insightful and instructive.
That said, (more…)
Food for Legal Future Thought: Top 10 Emerging Technologies
A starting point for thinking about the legal future is to spot trends that may develop into scenarios with implications for law, legal practice, and legal education. Earlier this month the World Economic Forum did that for us in its announcement of the Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2013. One can easily envision legal issues growing out of several of the trends:
- OnLine Electric Vehicles: This involves using wireless technology to power and charge EVs while they move down the road. If the system is widely available, EV batteries can be smaller and the vehicle range extended. Of course, this will requires a massive infusion of new infrastructure in the form of the transmission system in the roads.
- 3-D printing and remote manufacturing: 3-D printing is pretty cool, but already it has led people to ask about labor market implications, world trade implications, and patent and copyright protections. The concept of “open source” 3-D printing, while revolutionary for manufacturing, also would make possible the printing of operable guns with nothing more than a computer and a desktop 3-D printer.
- Self-healing materials: Self-healing materials can repair themselves when cut, torn or otherwise damaged, with no human intervention. To the extent we begin to rely on them for health and safety, how will products liability law respond? (more…)
What Is Legal Futurism?
Law 2050 is concerned with the future of law, legal practice, and legal education. The study of these three topics is often broadly described as “legal futurism” or “legal futurology.” Although there is a robust discourse today about the future of legal practice and legal education, less attention has been devoted to systematic study of the future of substantive law and legal institutions as a discipline. For example, in 2011, the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL) convened dozens of legal experts and experts from other disciplines to consider the evolution of law over the next 20 years. As Hiil’s name suggests, the focus of the proceedings was on the global scale (more on what HiiL produced in later posts). Hiil’s premise was that there was a need for more directed and focused effort in legal futurism. As Hiil explained in its report, Law Scenarios to 2030:
Legal futurists are not widespread among legal scholars and practitioners. compared with the extensive body of literature on the history of law, there is limited scholarly work on its longer-term future. Some scholars do focus on the future of law, but through very particular prisms, such as how technology will change it. Others address the future of only specific legal areas. Sometimes the future of legal traditions is questioned. On the whole, the limited time horizon of lawyers tends toward use of the most recently adopted law or court decision; they then look back and argue whether that particular law or decision will or will not work. Instead of systematically studying the future and future uncertainties, the lawyer’s way of dealing with uncertainties is to act through unadapted and contemporary norms, decisions, and institutions.
Speaking more succinctly, (more…)
How Will Climate Change Change Law? An Exercise in Legal Futurism
A rapidly growing number of legal academics and practitioners around the world are engaging in one of the largest legal futurism exercises ever endeavored–thinking about how the impacts of climate change and human responses to them will change law. Climate change presents a future of continuing changes across a wide spectrum of climate variables, everywhere, over an indefinite time horizon, with some changes producing conditions never before experienced by human civilizations. How fast and in what directions legal change might evolve under this “no-analog” future is difficult to say at this time given the uncertainty surrounding the pace and course of climate change, but many climate change scenarios have in common a number of projected impacts relevant to law. Obvious legal pressure points stemming from such impacts include rising sea levels, which will present questions of property ownership and protection along the coast, and shifting precipitation and snowmelt patterns, which will put further strain on water rights doctrine. Indeed, adaptation to these and other climate change impacts will likely spawn its own set of legal issues, as human migration and vast infusions of new infrastructure could trigger disputes over land use, environmental, and civil rights policies. Suffice it to say that it is difficult to envision a world in which adapting to climate change does not in some significant ways require the attention of legal institutions and adjustments to legislation, regulations, and common law doctrine. (more…)
Introducing Law 2050 – A Forum about the Legal Future
I am pleased to announce the creation of the Law 2050 blog, a forum for envisioning the future of law, legal practice, and legal education. My shorthand term for this endeavor is “legal futurism.” Legal futurism primarily considers questions such as: How will climate change influence property law? How will liability law respond to robotics and human bioengineering? How will energy regulation law need to change to accommodate a renewable energy future? Legal futurism draws from nonlegal disciplines such as scenario planning and change forecasting to focus on the social, economic, technological, and environmental forces of the future that will put pressure on law to change and will open up new legal opportunities. Legal futurism is thus both theoretical (what might law look like in 2050) and practical (how do lawyers participate in that legal future).
Although the focus of Law 2050 is primarily on the future of law and legal systems, it will also cover important events and news regarding the future of legal practice and legal education. The evolution of law influences the evolution of legal practice, and vice versa. And legal education had better keep its eyes on both processes to stay useful and relevant. (more…)
Law 2050 