Education for the provision of technologically enhanced legal services

Legal professionals increasingly rely on digital technologies when they provide legal services. The most advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) promise great advancements of legal services, but lawyers are traditionally not educated in the field of digital technology and thus cannot fully unlock the potential of such technologies in their practice. In this paper, we identify five distinct skills and knowledge gaps that prevent lawyers from implementing AI and digital technology in the provision of legal services and suggest concrete models for education and training in this area. Our findings and recommendations are based on a series of semi-structured interviews, design and delivery of an experimental course in ‘Law and Computer Science’, and an analysis of the empirical data in view of wider debates in the literature concerning legal education and 21st century skills.     

Disability and the legal profession in the United States

There are more people with disabilities than any other minority group in the United States. However, little attention is paid to lawyers and potential lawyers with disabilities. This article examines difficulties faced by people with a disability as law students through to participation in the legal profession. Aspects of discrimination and issues relating to discipline of lawyers and disabilities are canvassed. The legal profession in the United States is taking steps to increase representation of people with a disability in its ranks but it is a slow process.     

The making of the Canadian legal profession: a hybrid heritage

The Canadian legal profession emerged from the confluence of two distinct traditions: the American and the English. The colonies of British North America followed the pre-revolutionary American model of a unified legal profession, according to which all lawyers could practise as barristers and solicitors. American and Canadian lawyers pursued a client- and market-driven, eclectic type of practice that was receptive to innovations – such as the large law firm, the contingency fee, and university legal education – that were strongly resisted in England. On the governance side, however, Canadian lawyers created an indigenous but English-inflected model whereby professional self-governance was delegated to a statutorily-created body that had the power to compel all lawyers to join if they wished to practise law. With their commitment to client-centred service and strong governance, Canadian lawyers long enjoyed a cooperative and productive relationship with provincial governments, unlike the adversarial one characteristic of the United States or the long benign neglect of the legal professions by the English state. It is argued that this historical pattern may help to explain the continuing strength of the self-governance model in Canada at a time when it is being questioned and radically reformed elsewhere in the common law world.     

Social networking sites and the legal profession: Balancing benefits with navigating minefields

The purpose of this article is to review the impact of social networking sites on law, the legal profession and dispute resolution. Within a very short period of time, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, combined with social networking hardware platforms, such as iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, and Android, have infiltrated the profession of law and dispute resolution. Many legal professionals now have a social networking profile, use information on social networking sites as evidence, and interact with other lawyers and judges through such forums. This increased interaction in a publically accessible and viewable medium presents a challenge to the legal profession's traditional ideas of independence, confidentiality, and rules of evidence. Social networking mediums are here to stay. Therefore, this article looks at how this trend affects law and the legal profession, what issues it presents to lawyers and judges, whether new laws are necessary to take into account the impact of social networking sites and the benefits of such technology in fostering access to justice and helping parties achieve justice.     

Legal ethnography: Exploring the gendered nature of legal method

Beginning with the idea of law as discourse, this essay examines the ways in which legal method is gendered. Texts, such as affidavits and court forms, and local ‘mundane’ practices are part of the production and affirmation of the law as a producer of truth. A possible methodology for exploring legal method, ‘legal ethnography,’ is introduced as a means by which wemight explicate how legal method works to support and reify legal discourse, in the process silencing the voices of women. The essay also explores how legal method comes to be accepted as a ‘tool of the trade’ by lawyers, who then use it to translate the primary narrative of the client into a cause of action that is comprehensible to lawyers, judges, and other actors in the legal system. Finally, the limitations of the proposed methodology are considered.     

Utilising AI in the legal assistance sector—Testing a role for legal information institutes

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in law has again become of great interest to lawyers and government. Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) have played a significant role in the provision of legal information via the web. The concept of ‘free access to law’ is not static, and the evolution of its principles now requires a response from providers of free access to legal information (‘a LII response’) to this renewed prominence of AI. This should include improving and expanding free access to legal advice. This paper proposes, and proposes to test, one approach that LIIs might take in the use of AI (specifically, ‘decision support’ or ‘intelligent assistance’ (IA) technologies), an approach that leverages the very large legal information assets that some LIIs have built over the past two decades. This approach focuses on how LIIs can assist providers of free legal advice (the ‘legal assistance sector’) to serve their clients. We consider the constraints that the requirement of ‘free’ imposes (on both the legal assistance sector and on LIIs), including on what types of free legal advice systems are sustainable, and what roles LIIs may realistically play in the development of such a ‘commons of free legal advice’. We suggest guidelines for development of such systems. The AI-related services and tools that the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) is providing (the ‘DataLex’ platform), and how they could be used to achieve these goals, are outlined.     

Mystery shopping: demand-side phenomena in markets for personal plight legal services

ABSTRACT

“Personal plight” is the sector of the legal services industry in which the clients are individuals, and the legal needs arise from disputes. This article proposes that competition among personal plight law firms is suppressed by three demand-side phenomena. First, consumers confront high search costs. Identifying competing law firms willing and able to provide the needed services often requires significant expenditure of temporal and psychological resources. Second, comparable price and quality information about firms is scarce for consumers. Both of these factors impede comparison shopping and reduce competitive pressure on firms. A third competition-suppressing factor is observed in tort legal service markets, where offerings are typically priced on a contingency basis. Contingency fees have relatively low salience to consumers, and this reduces consumers’ willingness to negotiate and comparison-shop on the basis of price. This analysis is supported by the author’s empirical research with Ontario personal plight lawyers as well as the existing literature. The article concludes by suggesting possible consequences of this analysis for regulatory policy.     

Conceptualising legal culture and lawyering stress

Recent evidence of the prevalence of stress and mental health issues among Australian lawyers has led to calls for legal culture to be changed to promote a better work–life balance and wellbeing for practitioners. Yet three decades of empirical studies in North America have shown consistently high levels of job satisfaction among lawyers. This paper investigates the role of legal culture in sustaining the paradox of satisfied lawyers under working conditions that may be conducive to stress. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of practice and the literature on work stress, the paper conceptualises the relationships between the demand of legal work, the culture of legal practice, and lawyering stress. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of this kind of analysis for reforming the legal profession. In spite of the difficulty of cultural change, the paper argues that as consciousness is raised and the field changes, alternative models of practice will need to emerge, so that lawyering stress may become a mechanism for change not reproduction.     

Law Professors: A Profile of the Teaching Branch of the legal Profession

In the United States, law schools provide the principal route of entry into the legal profession. Indeed, education in a law school is the only experience that virtually all members of the modern legal profession have in common. The gatekeeping function of law schools places the nation's law teachers in a most influential position. Although law professors play a vital role in selecting and molding the members of the profession, little research has been done on them. This article presents the results of the American Bar Foundation's first major study of law teachers. The author finds them to be a most highly credentialed group of lawyers, the overwhelming majority of whom are graduates of a small group of elite law schools. She also finds that possession of a degree from one of these schools appears to be not only highly determinative of who become law teachers but also of the nature of teachers' academic careers.     

Advancing justice interests and human rights of vulnerable groups through clinical legal education

Access to justice rights of vulnerable groups in the Maldives is significantly affected due to lack of information, awareness, accessibility, and legal representation. The provision of State-funded legal aid is only available in serious criminal cases, and free legal services provided by individual lawyers and civil society organisations are limited and scattered. Out of 20, only a handful of atolls in the Maldives have resident lawyers offering legal services. Thus, as a country with over 200 inhabited islands, key vulnerable groups such as women and children face serious challenges in attaining legal services and access to the system. This article emphasises the broader objectives of legal education and argues that by pursuing social justice goals and advancing the human rights of vulnerable groups in the Maldives, university law clinics can benefit legal education and the society at large.

     

IT and Law,and Law Schools

If 'computing and law' as a discipline is to push forward and develop, it will do so best within the context of the law school rather than as a joint enterprise between law and other disciplines. It is in the law school that the understanding of the nature of law is at its height. Yet there are problems here-law schools have a strained relationship with technology and their concept of the breadth of 'legal scholarship' can be limited by conventional (or ideologically-biased) views of law and an undergraduate-oriented view of the law school's purpose. There are also problems arising from the nature of communications between lawyers and computer scientists. In this article, I highlight these problems and also argue for a more developed and extended view of legal scholarship which will be able to incorporate study and research of the impact of the computer upon legal society as well as the legal control of the unwanted elements arising from these new technologies. Most writings on IT and the law school concentrate upon its use as an educational tool. My interest here is not so much in this side of things, but in the research culture of the law school. Whilst there is sometimes a view that the linkage of law school and IT is purely related to the use of technology in legal education, the remit is wider and includes the understanding of the link between substantive law and the context of the new computerized world and also the impact of the computer in the practice of law. This latter aspect is becoming increasingly important with the Woolf reforms and computerization of the procedural elements of law, but also in substantive law: for example, administrative systems are becoming more and more mediated by technology, and administrative law must be reviewed and re-worked in this context.     

Mediation,financial remedies,information provision and legal advice: the post-LASPO conundrum*

The near-total collapse in numbers of solicitors providing legal advice and assistance to publicly-funded clients attempting to settle private family law issues through mediation since the legal aid reforms implemented in 2013 raises important questions about how, if at all, clients in mediation can receive legal information and advice other than from lawyers in financial cases following divorce. This article explores, in a preliminary way, this aspect of mediation practice, drawing on small-scale qualitative data from a study conducted shortly prior to the legal aid reforms concerning the settlement of such cases. It explores how mediators then approached their (permissible) function of providing clients with legal information and how they dealt with cases where they felt that the proposed outcome was particularly unfair to one party or unlikely to be endorsed by a court, and asks how mediation practice – and legal practice – may come under pressure to change in this brave new world.     

司法制度中的几个法律语言学问题

法律语言学就是将语言学应用于法律问题的学科,司法制度中与语言学相关问题:语言与法律的关系、法律诉讼中语言学家的介入、语言学家与律师的关系、陪审团指令的理解、语言学家作为专家证人出庭等方面应该引起关注。     

Boycott,Resistance and the Law: Cause Lawyering in Conflict and Authoritarianism

This article examines the role of cause lawyers in conflicted or authoritarian contexts where the chances of legal victory are often minimal. Drawing upon the literature on resistance, performance, memory studies, legal consciousness and the sociology of lawyers, the paper examines how cause lawyers challenge and subvert power. The paper first explores the tactics and strategies of cause lawyers who boycott legal proceedings and the relationship between such boycotts and broader political struggles, legitimacy and law. It then examines why and how cause lawyers engage in fairly hopeless legal struggles as acts of instrumental resistance (the ‘sand in the cogs’), transforming courts into sites of symbolic resistance, and using law as a form of memory work. The paper argues that boycott of and resistance through the courts can counter the use of law as an instrument of wickedness and a tool of denial and preserves a ‘stubborn optimism’ in the rule of law.     

Regulating smart home technology devices under Malaysian legal framework

Notwithstanding the substantial benefits from the deployment of smart technology devices in a home, the prevalent issues of safety and security protection for the users from defective and malfunction of home devices under the law is still inadequate. This paper adopts doctrinal legal research where statutory provisions of products safety and quality standards, laws and guidelines will be analysed. This paper proposes that, in order for Malaysian consumer law to provide protection to the smart home users, the law must be able to clearly address consumer-related issues in a smart home. On the other side, the statutory Housing Sale and Purchase Agreement should be able to address issues related to the smart infrastructure in a home to avoid injustice and denial of right of the smart home buyers to be protected by the law. In addition, the requirement to strengthen rules on duty and responsibility of smart home stakeholders should be addressed to ensure manufacturers and service providers adhere to the products’ safety requirements. This study is beneficial in terms of acquainting housing and consumer regulatory body to take into consideration the needs to review the existing law to avoid discrepancies in facing the emerging of technologies in housing development.     

Some recent developments in the legal relationship between parent and child

This article is based on a paper read at the Oxford Round Table Sir William Blackstone Colloquium on Public School Law in Oxford in 2000. Living and working in the 18th century, Sir William Blackstone was one of the most prominent English lawyers of all time, his influence still enduring in England and in many other countries with historical links with England. Because Blackstone regarded the relationship between parent and child as very important, the author therefore traced it through three broad periods: Blackstone's own times, South Africa before 1994 and South Africa after 1994. In preparing the paper, the author realised that many changes had taken place in the legal relationship between parent and child in South Africa since 1994 and that their implications for education management need to be explored. Education law literature in South Africa is certainly still largely dominated by the law as it was before 1994; so are the management implications drawn from it. The article has four sections: first, aspects of the parent-child relationship in South African law before the new Constitutional dispensation; second, relevant developments in South African under the new Constitution(s) and finally, a conclusion.     

From refuge to trap: formalist misadventures of Poland’s postsocialist legal profession

ABSTRACT

Since 2015 the populist government of the Law and Justice Party in Poland has spearheaded a highly effective campaign against the country’s lawyers, encountering relatively muted social opposition. Using Bourdieuan lenses, the article traces the roots of that remarkable institutional weakness of the Polish legal profession to the highly formalist approach to law and legal thinking that Poland’s lawyers espoused. Prior to the fall of communism, and in democratic Poland, the role of lawyers in society was to act as guardians of “neatness” of the legal system – or that system’s internal clarity, cohesion, and completeness. Such a sterile approach to legal practice was initially attractive, among other reasons, because it protected the legal profession from difficult legitimacy challenges stemming from that profession’s pre-1989 coexistence with the communist regime. With time, however, the refuge that formalism offered became a trap that undermined lawyers’ political and economic power.     

Discursive mismatch and globalization by stealth: The fight against corruption in the Brazilian legal field

Law and globalization studies have documented how Global South lawyers compete over the adaptation of international norms. Yet, little is known about how this adaptation legitimates worldviews beyond the law. To advance this literature, this paper proposes a discourse-centered field analysis of the legal globalization of anti-corruption ideas in Brazil. It examines Brazilian lawyers' disputes over a 2016 anti-corruption bill. The bill supporters mobilize global anti-corruption discourses that are exogenous to the legal field to defend harsher criminal law. Their critics counter the reform by mobilizing endogenous legal ideas against criminal law expansion. In so doing, they do not challenge reformers' ideas about corruption. I show how this discursive mismatch leads to a form of globalization by stealth, whereby local dynamics allow global ideas to remain unchallenged in local fields.     

Building sustainable free legal advisory systems: Experiences from the history of AI & law

The enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI) as a source of solutions to problems is not new. In law, from the early 1980s until at least the early 2000s, considerable work was done on developing ‘legal expert systems.’ As the DataLex project, we participated in those developments, through research and publications, commercial and non-commercial systems, and teaching students application development. This paper commences with a brief account of that work to situate our perspective.The main aim of this paper is an assessment of what might be of value from the experience of the DataLex Project to contemporary use of ‘AI and law’ by free legal advice services, who must necessarily work within funding and other constraints in developing and sustaining such systems. We draw fifteen conclusions from this experience, which we consider are relevant to development of systems for free legal advice services. The desired result, we argue, is the development of integrated legal decision-support systems, not ‘expert systems’ or ‘robot lawyers’. We compare our insights with the approach of the leading recent text in the field, and with a critical review of the field over twenty-five years. We conclude that the approach taken by the DataLex Project, and now applied to free legal advice services, remains consistent with leading work in field of AI and law.The paper concludes with brief suggestions of what are the most desirable improvements to tools and platforms to enable development of free legal advice systems. The objectives of free access to legal information services have much in common with those of free legal advice services. The information resources that free access to law providers (including LIIs) can provide will often be those that free legal advice services will need to use to develop and sustain free legal advisory systems. There is therefore strong potential for valuable collaborations between these two types of services providers.