future IT

The uncharitable might say we write the same book every four years or so. Some critics certainly accuse me of having said the same principal for many years. I don’t disagree. Since the early 80s, my enduring interest has been doing the ways in which technology can modernize and improve the repair of the legal profession and the courts. My main maintaining conviction has indeed not changed: that legal work is insurance and information intensive, and that a whole host of information technologies can and should streamline or even overhaul traditional methods of practicing law and administering justice.

Just what exactly have changed, of course, are the enabling technologies. When I started out on what has become a career devoted largely to legal technology, the web had not come to exist, nor had tablets, handheld devices, mobile phones, and much altogether different. As new technologies emerge, therefore, I always have a new story to make sure and more evidence that suggests the legal world is shifting from being cottage industry to an IT-enabled information sector.

The evolution of my thinking reflects my own technical interests and career activities progressively. My first work in the field, in the 1980s, focused entirely on artificial intelligence and its potential and limitations in the legal requirements. This began in earnest with my doctoral research at Oxford Higher education.











I was interested in the possibility of developing computer systems that could solve legal problems and offer legal advice. Many specialists at the time wanted to define expert systems in law in architectural terms (by reference to what underlying technologies were being used, from rule-based systems to neural networks). I took a more pragmatic view and described these systems functionally as computer applications that sought to make scarce legal knowledge and expertise more widely available and easily accessible.

This remains my fundamental aspiration today. I believe there is enormous scope for using technology, especially Internet technology, as a way of providing affordable, practical legal guidance to non-lawyers, especially those who are not able to pay for conventional legal service. These systems may not be expert systems, architecturally-defined. Instead, they are web-based resources (such as online advisory and document drafting systems) and are delivering legal help, on-screen, as envisaged back in the 1980s.



During the first half of the 90s, while I was working in a law firm (Masons, now Pinsent Masons), my work became less academic. I was bowled over by the web and began to form a view of the way it would revolutionize the communication habits of practicing lawyers and transform the information seeking practices of the legal fraternity. I also had some rudimentary ideas about online communities of lawyers and clients; we now call these social networks. My thinking came together in the mid-1990s. I became clear, in my own mind at least, that information technology would definitely challenge and change the world of law. Most people thought I was nuts.



A few years later, to help put my ideas into practice, I developed what I called ‘the grid’ – a simple model that explained the inter-relationships of legal data, legal information, legal knowledge, as found within law firms and shared with clients. I had used this model quite a bit with my clients (by this time, I was working independently) and it seemed to help lawyers think through what they should be doing about IT.