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"LEGAL PROFESSION"
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Glass half full : the decline and rebirth of the legal profession
\"The hits keep coming for the American legal profession. Law schools are churning out too many graduates, depressing wages, and constricting the hiring market. Big Law firms are crumbling, as the relentless pursuit of profits corrodes their core business model. Modern technology can now handle routine legal tasks like drafting incorporation papers and wills, reducing the need to hire lawyers; tort reform and other regulations on litigation have had the same effect. As in all areas of today's economy, there are some big winners; the rest struggle to find work, or decide to leave the field altogether, which leaves fewer options for consumers who cannot afford to pay for Big Law. It would be easy to look at these enormous challenges and see only a bleak future, but Ben Barton instead sees cause for optimism. Taking the long view, from the legal Wild West of the mid-nineteenth century to the post-lawyer bubble society of the future, he offers a close analysis of the legal market to predict how lawyerly creativity and entrepreneurialism can save the profession. In every seemingly negative development, there is an upside. The trend towards depressed wages and computerized legal work is good for middle class consumers who have not been able to afford a lawyer for years. The surfeit of law school students will correct itself as the law becomes a less attractive and lucrative profession. As Big Law shrinks, so will the pernicious influence of billable hours, which incentivize lawyers to spend as long as possible on every task, rather than seeking efficiency and economy. Lawyers will devote their time to work that is much more challenging and meaningful. None of this will happen without serious upheaval, but all of it will ultimately restore the health of the faltering profession. A unique contribution to our understanding of the legal crisis, the unconventional wisdom of Glass Half Full gives cause for hope in what appears to be a hopeless situation\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
LEGAL TECH, CIVIL PROCEDURE, AND THE FUTURE OF ADVERSARIALISM
\"Legal tech\" is transforming litigation and law practice, and its steady advance has tapped a rich vein of anxiety about the future of the legal profession. Much of the resulting debate narrowly focuses on what legal tech portends for the professional authority, and profitability, of lawyers. It is also profoundly futurist, full of references to \"robolawyers\" and \"robojudges.\" Lost in this rush to foretell the future of lawyers and their robotic replacements is what should be an equally important, and also more immediate, concern: What effect will legal tecKs continued advance have on core features of our civil justice system and, in particular, the procedural rules that structure it? Tackling that question, this Article seeks to enrich—and, in places, reorient—the budding debate about legal tech's implications for law and litigation by zeroing in on the near- to medium-term, not out at a distant, hazy horizon. It does so via three case studies, each one exploring how specific legal tech tools (e-discovery tools, outcome-prediction tools, and tools that perform advanced legal analytics) might alter litigation for good and ill by shifting the distribution of costs and information within the system. Each case study then traces how a concrete set of civil procedure rules—from Twombly/Iqbal's pleading standard and the work product doctrine to rules and doctrines that govern forum-shopping—can, or should, adapt in response. When these assorted dynamics are lined up and viewed together, it is not a stretch to suggest that legal tech will remake the adversarial system, not by replacing lawyers and judges with robots, but rather by unsettling, and even resetting, several of the system's procedural cornerstones. The challenge for courts—and, in time, for rulemakers and legislators—will be how best to adapt a digitized litigation system using civil procedure rules built for a very different, analog era. This Article aims to jumpstart thinking about that process by identifying the principal ways that legal tech will reshape \"our adversarialism\" and mapping a reform and research agenda going forward.
Journal Article
Rules for a flat world : why humans invented law and how to reinvent it for a complex global economy
\" If you want a simple representation of the twentieth-century economy, picture a large corporation as a box. To do the same for today's economy, though, we need to blow up that box and reassemble the pieces into a network. The network is global, stretching across the planet untethered to political and legal boundaries. This is the economy of the twenty-first century, characterized by ever-expanding global supply chains and communication systems. In 2005, Thomas Friedman reduced this phenomenon to one phrase, the title of his massively successful book: The World is Flat. Of course, the phrase is misleading. The world may be getting flatter in some places, but there are still many factors that tilt the odds in favor of some locations over others. Law and economics professor Gillian Hadfield picks up where Friedman's book left off, by peeling back the technological layer to look at what lies beneath-our legal infrastructure-and argues that the outdated legal system is, in fact, largely responsible for our still-slanted world. Put simply, the law and legal methods on which we currently rely have failed to evolve along with technology. Hadfield argues that not only are these systems too slow, costly, and localized to support economic complexity, they also fail to address looming challenges such as global warming, poverty, and oppression in developing countries. The answer, however, is not the one critics usually reach for-to have less of it. Through a sweeping review of law and the world economy over thousands of years, Hadfield makes the case for building a legal environment that does more of what we need it to do and less of what we don't. Hadfield offers, in engaging and accessible prose, a model for a more market- and globally-oriented legal system. Combining an impressive grasp of economic globalization with an ambitious re-envisioning of our global legal system, Rules for a Flat World will transform our understanding of how to best achieve a more sustainable and vibrant global economy. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL AFFECT THE PRACTICE OF LAW
Artificial intelligence is exerting an influence on all professions and industries. We have autonomous vehicles, instantaneous translation among the world’s leading languages, and search engines that rapidly locate information anywhere on the web in a way that is tailored to a user’s interests and past search history. Law is not immune from disruption by new technology. Software tools are beginning to affect various aspects of lawyers’ work, including those tasks that historically relied upon expert human judgment, such as predicting court outcomes. These new software tools present new challenges and new opportunities. In the short run, we can expect greater legal transparency, more efficient dispute resolution, improved access to justice, and new challenges to the traditional organization of private law firms delivering legal services on a billable hour basis through a leveraged partner-associate model. With new technology, lawyers will be empowered to work more efficiently, deepen and broaden their areas of expertise, and provide more value to clients. These developments will predictably transform both how lawyers do legal work and resolve disputes on behalf of their clients. In the longer term, it is difficult to predict what the impact of artificially intelligent tools will be, as lawyers incorporate them into their practice and expand their range of services on behalf of clients.
Journal Article
Does the Ethos of Law Erode? Lawyers’ Professional Practices, Self-Understanding and Ethics at Work
Furthering an integrative ethics-as-practice framework, this paper explores the professional practices, self-understanding and ethics of lawyers working in the Germanic legal context. Existing studies of the legal profession often argue that changing conditions in law have led to a ‘constrained morality’ and an ‘erosion of ethos’ among lawyers. While the current study acknowledges shifts in lawyers’ ethos, it challenges the claim of an erosion or ‘lack’ of morality. The narratives of the interviewed practitioners rather suggest that socio-discursively constituted professional practices, identity and ethics are complex and contingent. Focusing on the ‘moral rules in use’ and how lawyers negotiate ethical matters ‘from within’ evokes ongoing ambiguities and struggles inscribed in ethical (self-)positions, pointing, as such, to the limits of assessing lawyers’ conduct as ‘ethical’ or ‘unethical’. The study thereby extends both normative and practice-based business and professional ethics studies.
Journal Article
Occupation, Organisation, Opportunity, and Oversight: Law Firm Client Accounts and (Anti-)Money Laundering
The misuse of law firm pooled client accounts has been identified as one of the primary areas of money laundering and terrorist financing risk for the legal profession. This article demonstrates the varied role that client accounts can play in money laundering, through both purposeful exploitation (by the predicate offender, the lawyer/law firm, or both) of the client account or of other legitimate business processes in which the client account inevitably plays a role, and/or a failure to fulfil regulatory requirements. It examines how the nature of law firm pooled client accounts in the UK creates and shapes an ‘opportunity structure’ for money laundering, and the occupational and organisational context of this opportunity structure. The article argues that examining the opportunity structures created by client accounts is a more useful approach than categorising them as inherently low, medium or high risk, as is seen in many national risk assessments and reports. Identifying the factors that create opportunities for money laundering through law firm client accounts can direct policymakers striving to prevent money laundering in the legal profession towards more targeted oversight mechanisms.
Journal Article
Legal Tech, the Law Firm and the Imagination of the Right Legal Answer
Legal tech is growing, and its growth provokes anxieties about the future of the legal profession as such. In this article, we examine the impact of legal tech on the central role of lawyers at law firms in crafting an imagined ‘right legal answer’ by drawing on Duncan Kennedy’s suggestion that a claim to the rightness of one’s legal propositions is a central characteristic of the legal profession. We first ask how changes in the organisation of legal services affect the ability of lawyers at law firms to produce that ‘right legal answer’. While legal tech only exacerbates already ongoing processes of eradication of routine tasks, we find that it continues to mask the role of ideology in arriving at a right legal answer under a new layer of technological projection. Second, we ask how lawyers’ ability to produce ‘the right legal answer’ is affected by, first, expert systems and, second, a legal tech application named Bryter, representing a no-code system. We find that expert systems do not permit to uphold the unity of the lawyer required for Kennedy’s model of the right legal answer, but that no-code systems as Bryter do so. No-code systems can be reduced to a slogan: Have the lawyer, but evict her ideological temptations more efficiently than before!
Journal Article
Gender Harassment
This study challenges the common legal and organizational practice of privileging sexual advance forms of sex-based harassment, while neglecting gender harassment. Survey data came from women working in two male-dominated contexts: the military and the legal profession. Their responses to the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (SEQ) revealed five typical profiles of harassment: low victimization, gender harassment, gender harassment with unwanted sexual attention, moderate victimization, and high victimization. The vast majority of harassment victims fell into one of the first two groups, which described virtually no unwanted sexual advances. When compared to non-victims, gender-harassed women showed significant decrements in professional and psychological well-being. These findings underscore the seriousness of gender harassment, which merits greater attention by both law and social science.
Journal Article
Outline of legal practice in India: developing the future of the Indian Legal Profession
In contemporary legal India, it is critical to obtain a deeper understanding of the preexisting structure of Legal Practice in India. While exploring post-1991 change, we must also understand the impact of Liberalization, Privatization, and Globalization, particularly Globalization toward law practice in India. Law practice, predominantly litigation, and corporate law firms, has a significant impact on India's socioeconomic as well as political structure. Besides, such a deeper understanding not only provides the context of the topic, theme, or purpose but also assists in constructing a relatively common factual or analytical base. This analytical and deep understanding shared by many of the prominent legal dignitaries, which can be found common, helps to understand and interpret the law in a better way. In light of this, the growth in the legal profession has been impressive, but the ground realities should not be stayed untouched. This review article has endeavored to modify the typology of the Indian Legal Profession. The base has been relied upon in the US corporate legal market. The reasons were that Western corporate firms and in-house legal departments were the first to develop and are generally acclaimed as being the best in the world. Second, even Indian lawyers who prefer not to adopt the American model often define their approach in opposition to the American model, making the comparison more relevant. Third, given India's increasing interactions with the global marketplace, Indian law firms, their employees, and their clients are likely to have more direct exposure to US and UK corporate law firms and legal departments. Finally, to the extent that the new corporate legal market in India has developed in part in perceptions about the Anglo-American corporate legal market, changes in the latter market may foretell changes that will affect the Indian legal market in the coming years. This is particularly of interest because some of the realignment of corporate legal services markets in the United States and the United Kingdom are precipitated by globalization-which is one of the key drivers of change in the Indian legal market and its future.
Journal Article
Legaltech and Lawtech: Global Perspectives, Challenges, and Opportunities
Legaltech refers to the application of new technologies to the world of law, to carry out tasks that, until recently, were performed by lawyers or other personnel working in law firms. From 2015 onwards the Lawtech alternative has emerged. In this work, the concepts of Legaltech and Lawtech have been analyzed by searching the two main scientific information databases such as Scopus and Wed of Science (WoS). There has been a clear trend to use the concept of Legaltech against Lawtech. Six clear research lines have been detected from the whole of the published documents regarding these concepts. These are the related to Computer Science, Justice, Legal profession, Legal design, Law firms, and Legal Education. It is proposed to use the term Legaltech to include all technological advances in the legal field. From the point of view of opportunities, the irruption of Legaltech will be able to offer accurate legal advice to the public, reducing the price of this and on the other hand, analyze large amounts of data that law firms and legal advisors will use to improve their management and increase their productivity. In short, Legaltech and Lawtech are opening up new opportunities in the legal sector encouraging technological innovation, giving greater access to legal services, even try to achieve the goal of universal access to justice.
Journal Article