For an analysis of the professional implications of legal technology, see Richard Susskind, The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (revised edition, Oxford University Press 2010); but see Markovic (No. 39) (arguing that technology is unlikely to undermine the market for professional legal services). Another important trend within legal technology, which was quickly recognized as a great advantage, is the ability to reap the benefits of better collaboration. All this means that legal technologies also have affordances, and these types of affordances differ in that they are exclusively legal. The specificity dimension reflects this and represents the degree to which a technology has a set of specifically legal or more general affordances. Sometimes the availability of these offers depends on the context, for example: whether the user is a layman, a lawyer or someone who works in an official capacity, but regardless of whether the offers are available or not. Low-specificity legal technologies – i.e. enabling technologies – may have legal options, but so may many non-legal options. They can be applied to law or legal practice, but they can also be used for independent purposes. For example, the word processing software I currently use is a generic technology. It can be used to deal with the law, but it is not primarily intended for such use and it has many non-legal uses. At the other end of the spectrum, there would be technology with very specific legal possibilities and few that are not legally linked. For example, an automated contract clause generator has almost exclusively legally relevant offers.
It is true that, since the law affects all human activities, enabling technologies can and often have an impact on law and legal practice. As such, they will appear in the discussions on the technological implications below. For now, however, we focus on “legal” technologies, and so we`ll turn first to the other three types of categories that are either used as a means to legal purposes or that allow legal uses in the first place. Many people who talk about the benefits of legal technology put this first, and then the rest of the benefits feel like an afterthought. Ensuring that your contracts and legal documents are professional, typeless and legally sound is excellent. Still, you probably check all those boxes most of the time! AI and machine learning (ML) have spawned developments in legal technology that have changed the way lawyers do their jobs. Some of these technologies have been welcomed with open arms, while others raise lawyers` brows. Answering this question depends on how you define legal technology.
If you don`t use legal technology in your practice, you`ll be left behind by the entire industry sooner rather than later. We can adapt this general definition of technology to provide one that focuses specifically on legal technologies. This brings us to a definition of Legal Tech as: “all devices that can be used as a means of interacting with the substance of the law or helping its user interact with the law, and the skills and techniques with which we use them.” This includes all technologies that can be used for “lawful purposes”. Map legal technologies according to their “directness” (how they deal directly with the law in a non-intermediate and/or formal way) and their “specificity” (the extent to which they primarily provide legal services). While these two dimensions are useful for visualization purposes, they are not really orthogonal to each other and do not decrease by half as cleanly as shown. In reality, the “generic technology” quadrant would occupy only a small corner at the bottom left. These technologies do not interact directly or indirectly with the law. Once a technology is able to interact with the law, albeit in a fairly publicized and indirect way, it becomes a “legal” technology and, therefore, the quadrant of “generic legal technology” would occupy a large part of the bottom half of the space.
Legal design is perhaps the element of legal technology that will be most diverse in a year or two. This will undoubtedly be the case if future developments in legal design continue at the same pace as in recent years. In addition to the legal impact that technology can have in enabling changes to the law itself, and the functional impact it can have in changing the methods of legal practice and the functioning of legal systems, legal technologies can also have broader social effects by transforming communities governed by the legal systems that adopt them. These non-legal implications are similar to those that can arise from any technology, and so I call them “general implications” here. This type of involvement often results from the substantial and functional changes brought about by legal technology. Since the legal system is closely linked to society, changing the substance of the law or changing its practice in functionally important ways will almost certainly have consequences that are not legal in nature. If your business has suffered from the loss of clients or contracts that have not been signed due to cumbersome documents filled out by legal language, Legal Tech is the first step in the solution! Similar to legal technology in general, there`s a lot of hype around AI. In truth, there has been hype about AI in every industry for many years. The lesson here is that technologies that substantially alter the law deserve varying degrees of oversight depending on whether or not they are able to incorporate objective criteria into how they transform the rules they change. Some areas of law are largely distinct from the moral considerations in dispute and are implicitly or explicitly structured to achieve an agreed outcome. These areas of law are best suited to developments in legal technology, as they set clearer design standards and raise less sensitive issues.
Other areas of law do not offer objective criteria that can be used as a basis for their design. As a result, these jurisdictions are less likely to be able to unquestionably adopt technologies that significantly change the law. In these areas, the humanity of the legal enterprise can be central to the legitimacy of the legal system.49 After all this time and effort, it would be very understandable to ask, “Why?” Why is it important that the most amorphous technologies sometimes referred to as “legal technology” can be classified according to these two dimensions of their generic usefulness and the directness with which they deal with the law? Does the categorization that makes this sorting possible offer more than a useful “meaningful” explanation for legal technologies? Before we take a closer look at developments in legal technology, it`s worth looking at how legal technology drives the development of the legal industry itself. The biggest question you`re likely to ask yourself as a law firm or lawyer when it comes to using technology for your work is “Why?” Most of this technology is typically designed to help lawyers and law firms practice law more efficiently, such as being able to sign documents with electronic signatures instead of having to print everything and sign by hand. As the technology moves from the generic to the specific end of the spectrum, it becomes more likely to have a functional impact on the legal system. By definition, these specific legal technologies influence how we engage in law-related activities. It is therefore in their nature to change the functioning of legal systems, and they raise important questions for the legal profession. For example, certain legal technologies are more likely to raise issues related to access to justice.62 These technologies are able to reduce the cost of legal services, thereby improving access to justice,63 or, alternatively, provide tools that are only available to those who can afford them, making access to justice less equitable.64 Due to functional implications, that are in nature, Legal technologies in particular are more likely to raise ethical design considerations. Developers of specific legal technologies must therefore consider the impact that their technologies may have on consumers of legal services. Depending on their own interests, they may also want to consider the impact on the legal profession in general. After all, these functional implications are more relevant to those who make a living in legal capacity.65 Also consider how amazing it is that something as simple as data access helps your legal practice make better decisions.
Although these technologies are largely theoretical at this point, we can think of a few examples. For example, reactive speed limits are a simple example of this type of reactive legal technology.38 By monitoring traffic congestion and updating local speed limits to ensure traffic safety, automatic speed limit technologies not only take rules and facts as input data and give legal interpretations as results, but update the current rules according to which the Regulate behavior. A large part of the superficial legal technology category is populated by generic technologies specifically adapted for legal use. This reflects the recombinatorial nature of technology, where technological developments are recombined in different ways and reused in new variants.34 For example, technologies such as the case management systems mentioned above or legal advice search engines are adaptations of generic database and information retrieval systems designed specifically for legal applications. It seems likely that a similar dynamic exists within the technologies used at different levels of the legal community.
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