Allowed to be wrong sometimes

For years now, the question has been discussed again and again in relevant formats whether lawyers will need programming skills in the future. I have always denied this - to acquire and maintain good legal knowledge is enough to fill an evening, there is no room for another discipline (apart from exceptions).

Today I say: that was too short-sighted. Just as marketing professionals need to have a deep understanding of the processes around digital advertising, lawyers of the future need to have a good understanding of the relevant digital technologies.

They don't have to be the ones writing lines of code for e-discovery suites. But they do need to be able to assess what to expect from the various technologies that are usually grouped under the umbrella term "artificial intelligence." Lawyers and notaries, corporate lawyers, judges, prosecutors and administrative lawyers - all of them will, in the course of their very own work, be facing the question of the use of technology for certain process or procedural steps and will have to assess for themselves what they can expect from it and what the risks are. By this I don't mean the eternal data protection issues, but issues such as bias, training sets, confidentiality, and most especially error calculus.

This also creates a whole new set of challenges for legal academia, but even more so for continuing legal education. For a long time, lawyers have seen time constraints as their central problem. The tension will only be resolved if ... but that is another story.

Show factor

In his column "Lost in innovation," the highly respected Markus Hartung expresses doubts about the innovative power of both law firms and their clients, the legal departments. There is no other way to explain the fact that both staff numbers and per capita turnover at law firms continue to rise, but so does the number of employees in legal departments, Hartung says. Innovation would require a permanent, joint process analysis between law firms and their clients, and there is no sign of this.

So far, so undisputed. But is this relationship really only a professional one? I claim, no. The value of consulting services (both of lawyers and of tax and business consultants) is, after all, also determined to a considerable extent on an emotional level. The particularly aggressive lawyer's letter to the opposing party, theatrical meetings, and even heavy documents - they all serve to convince clients of the extraordinary qualifications of "their" lawyer and of his overwhelming commitment to the cause.

The question remains why clients play along here. The answer is probably differentiated: some because they want to - the behavior described above gives them self-justification that they have made the right choice. And the others? - they are probably to be found in the rapidly growing group of clients willing to change, as described in the current Future Ready study by WoltersKluwer. 

Everything will stay the same until it will change.