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.

Clause libraries instead of doc automation?

As Chief Product Officer of LexisNexis GB, Andy Sparkes is the master of 250 employees. In an interview for Artficial Lawyer he recently gave insight into the focus of their developments .

The most important asset continues to be high-quality content. In a first, complex step, it is technically developed and interlinked, for example by systematically adding references or metadata. This is followed by the introduction of analytical tools to make the content more accessible to customers. The third step is integration into the customer workflow. 

The whole thing is called "Legal Intelligence" and is intended to help lawyers make more decisions based on data (facts).

There was an interesting and, at first glance, surprising statement: LexisNexis GB is fully committed to integrating their content and tools into Office 365. The reason: the use of Office programs is so deeply established that customers are not willing to use third-party software. Clause libraries and guidance notes instead of doc automation.

What do we learn from this? Law business is local business - even in times of digitization.