SmartCourts.org

Part 1 - Introduction

Welcome to smartcourts.org - engineering the legal singularity

The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.
Jeremy Bentham (1808)

What is a smart court? A court is smart if it begins to deploy any technology which curtails the role of lawyers in the legal system, contracts the scope of what is called the practice of law, or reduces the roles lawyers play in the delivery of legal services.

A blind court intent on becoming a smart court must gradually reduce the uncertainty of the law by developing and deploying computational legal certainty.

Ray Kurzweil has a near trademark on the term, singularity, which he defines as the amalgamation of human neural nature and computational hardware and software. Intelligence will increasingly become non-organic and “trillions of times more powerful than it is today,” he predicts. Hyperbole aside, the legal singularity explored in this blog is a pragmatic project fueled by the scandal that legal services delivered by licensed attorneys are too expensive, and not very good either. 

Part 2 - The Legal Singularity

Is Technology Destroying Lawyer Jobs

Given his calm and reasoned academic demeanor, it is easy to miss just how provocative Erik Brynjolfsson’s contention really is. ­Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine

via www.technologyreview.com

Big Data - Less Litigation ?

Big data is also helping the modern GC more accurately predict the results of a case before the first salvo is fired.

Yes, every case is a unique, but there exists reliable data about the cost-to-try, probable settlement amounts, and jury verdicts in most categories of case. The breadth and depth of that data is only improving.

As big data becomes widely available to both sides of a conflict, it improves lawyers’ case analysis, and leads to more and earlier settlements—causing fewer trials. It could lead to fewer cases being filed at all. This frees public resources—courtrooms, judges, clerks, deputies—for those cases where there’s truly an important societal issue that can only be resolved in a public forum.

via www.forbes.com

Symposium on Justice, Lawyering and Legal Education in the Digital Age

Staudt and Lauritsen observe two cross-cutting themes within the collected works:

1. “Advanced information systems have rapidly become ubiquitous both in the subject matter of legal work and in the processes through which that work is done. The Legal Academy can no longer afford to give those systems as little attention as it presently does. Lawyers can no longer afford to have as little understanding of algorithms, ontologies, and other computational concepts as they do.”
2. “By studying—or better yet, building—software systems that perform some of the tasks that lawyers and judges do, future (and present) legal professionals gain insight into emerging technologies at the center of modern law practice and also develop core competencies across a range of new and traditional lawyering skills.”

via spotlight.cali.org

Symposium on Justice, Lawyering and Legal Education in the Digital Age

Staudt and Lauritsen observe two cross-cutting themes within the collected works:

1. “Advanced information systems have rapidly become ubiquitous both in the subject matter of legal work and in the processes through which that work is done. The Legal Academy can no longer afford to give those systems as little attention as it presently does. Lawyers can no longer afford to have as little understanding of algorithms, ontologies, and other computational concepts as they do.”
2. “By studying—or better yet, building—software systems that perform some of the tasks that lawyers and judges do, future (and present) legal professionals gain insight into emerging technologies at the center of modern law practice and also develop core competencies across a range of new and traditional lawyering skills.”

via spotlight.cali.org