Technology as a cognitive extension to Legal Skills
"Smarter than you think, how technology is changing our minds for the better" by Clive Thompson, William Collins Edition (2013)

Technology as a cognitive extension to Legal Skills

In his book "Smarter than you think, how technology is changing our minds for the better" Clive Thompson gives the example of how using technology has actually benefited the world of chess as opposed to making grand master irrelevant.

This is a great analogy with the Legal world and skilled legal practitioners fearing that technology will replace them and how Technology can make use better lawyers.

Clive Thompson refers to the process of becoming a grand chess master before the advent of computer. It was a slow process, largely based on access to other grand masters to be taught from and access to specialised libraries which contained painstakingly captured transcript of previous chess games (the most complete one being in Moscow). In the 80s, a lot of these match transcripts were made available on floppy disks and later on CDs, giving any chess enthusiast, anywhere in the world, access to a virtually unlimited number of games and moves. It was now possible to "war play" or "test" a move one would have thought about against what an opponent might do using specialised chess software.

Rather than killing the game of chess and making grand masters irrelevant, this has increased the overall level of chess playing and forced (human) chess players to be even more creative with their moves. It has also enabled proficient and dedicated chess players to progress to a higher level a lot faster.

This analogy transposes very nicely to the legal world. 

As a baseline, technology can make us better lawyers, help us learn and "recall" faster as opposed to replacing us. The fact that "rote memory" is one of the major requirement to successfully study (and to some extend practice) law is in itself a failure of the legal world in 2019. We should leverage technology more efficiently to teach real "game situation", example of cases to student so that they get exposed to more cases, faster. Some law schools already focus on teaching students how to search and statistically analyse a large number of cases using technology instead of dissecting a small number of "seminal" cases.

When coupled with advocacy, empathy and strong "big picture" & negotiation skills, the best litigator would be the one who has handled hundred of cases, can dig into that mental archive and make the connection with the case at hand. Similarly , the best Commercial lawyer would be one that "has seen it all" over the course of a career and can replay a negotiation or situation from his or her own experience.

There is now so much data on cases, precedents, outcomes, legal analysis as well as template contracts, negotiation outcomes available so easily that it should be a lot easier now to impart that knowledge to law school students or recent lawyers in a much more efficient way and more importantly, for any lawyer to have access to that general knowledge to "role play" a situation.

When coupled with an intimate understanding of our customer's individual situation and preferences, technology can also help us "role play" a situation against past cases, precedents, known scenarios and obtain a statistical view of the matter at hand. Technology in that case acts as a cognitive extension of the lawyers brains, allowing us to give our best possible advice to the clients.

This is done today but only is a very limited number of cases and by a limited number of law firms or legal departments. I'm surprise that "expert systems" are not more widely (i.e. systematically) used, whether simple decision trees or complex forecasting algorithms. 

Lawyers of course do this "analysis" instinctively, but it tends to be done "in our minds" and that again relies on ones own experience, memory and bias. Not ideal from a client perspective.


Having access to this wide source of relevant knowledge, channeling it in a way that can be exploited easily would allow lawyers to rely less on their own previous experience but extend their experience with that of the "community", in a similar way that software code is often made available in open-source for the benefit of the wider community and allows software developers to "code" faster, produce better software and focus on the UX/UI instead of developing complex back-end components which can be largely obtained as "objects" and leverage a lot faster. That hasn't reduced the number of Software developers per se but has forced them to adapt and become more client focused. It has however reduced development cycle times (Matter resolution time in legal) and made software development more accessible to a wider number (we can already see the start of a similar trends in Access to Justice)

Lawyering skills would evolve from "having the most experience" to a heavier emphasis on advocacy, ability to relate to the customer's goals to deliver faster outcomes. 

 Leaving know how aside, this is largely what the disciple of Knowledge Management (KM) has been aiming at achieving but that typically aims at capturing just a portion of knowledge, institutional knowledge from a single organisation (whether a Law firm or in-house team) it's aim is to make sure that "current institutional knowledge" is not lost as opposed to aggregating "all relevant knowledge" available inside and outside the organisation. Instead of aiming at avoiding knowledge leakage, KM programs should aim at absorbing and ingesting all knowledge that is useful to them, regardless of its source.

Technology can extend our reach and ability as lawyers however it is forcing a change from a "savant" who's value resides in the knowledge they hold in their minds to being experts who have an in-depth understanding of their client's issues and objectives. Less time learning about past cases, researching and analysing law, let technology do that, more time understanding how to better support the business and more room for creativity. 




Abhinandan Mandhana

Advanced Data Scientist | Technological Innovator | Creative Automation | Expert Data Sculpting | Machine Learning | GenAI

4y

A well written and though provoking article Jerome. There are nuances of technology and limitation of variables on the learning sets of data though which a lawyer (chess player) can identify new moves and learn them. Will technology be able to create original problem solving algorithms, its still unclear. However, it can leverage on human problem solving techniques and help in spreading the awareness (reducing the data volume to be checked). Just a though that got provoked after reading the informative article...but surely it is far from replacing humans in the workforce, it can only learn from humans and apply the proper technique at the right place and time, but it will always need a brain to provide the inputs.

Debbie Reynolds

The Data Diva | Global Data Privacy & Protection Expert Strategist | Technologist | Keynote Speaker | Author | Educator | Cyber | Advisor | Futurist | Internet of Things (IoT) | #1 Data Privacy Podcast Host | Polymath

4y

Thanks Jerome Raguin for this thought provoking article. This is an excellent example of how best the leverage technology in law. Best Debbie Reynolds

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