 Hello, welcome to Massachusetts Legal Hackers at the MIT Media Lab. This is a lightning talk, going to be the first one of them. My name is Michael Simon, I am a legal consultant doing legal technology. I've got my own legal consulting firm right now, but soon, actually by the time you're probably watching this, I'll be a member of Duff and Phelps. So, if you need my new contact info, I can get that to you at the end. This talk is about the future of law, whether it's going to be an AI-assisted atopia or a jobless robot hellscape. Because when you talk to lawyers in legal futures about where the law is going with all this automation that we now see, everyone tends to divide into one of two camps. They believe that the future is going to make us so much better. The AI is going to improve what we do as lawyers. Take care of all the drudgery. Robots will do the hard work, or they believe that robots will steal their jobs. The thing is, they're both actually right because they're both actually wrong. Because the answer is actually both. You see, robots don't want our jobs. Robots don't want anything. They're robots. People want things. And when we talk about what people want, we talk about the science of economics. And when we look at economics, what we see is that increasingly in our society, we are concentrating success at the very top. That it's not an even distribution. That the people who have more and have less. And so when we look at this quote that we all know, we all take as a challenge, a call to action, let's distribute that future. Really, it's actually much more, I think, of a warning that it never will be. And we see these kinds of effects in the law. When we look at the starting salaries, you're just one graph. There's a lot of them, but I picked this one because it's a very illustrative one. Here's just one graph that talks about where starting lawyers tend to come in on their beginning salaries. It looks like a fairly random bell curve, even distribution. Folks are kind of hitting around 70, you know, around 50,000 a year to start, except when I pull back and reveal all the chart, what we see is in fact there's a small contingent of starting lawyers who are making two to three times out of the gate what their peers are making. This is actually much more like, as we see, again, that power law curve. And this type of problem actually is discussed as a big problem, and we're going to detail in it, and they soon to be published. Early next year, I promise, lodged an article by me and a friend of mine, Al Lindsey, at Hope Levels, who's a partner there, that talks about a very interesting case. David Lola vs. Skadden and Arms. What's it about? Well, again, big case. I don't want to spend too much time going through it. But in short, the Second Circuit had to decide whether what someone who was sitting in a computer all day reviewing documents to say whether it's relevant, not relevant, privileged, not privileged, whether that was, for purposes under certain labor laws, the practice of law. Part of the spirit books. And but what did the Second Circuit say? Well, they said something very surprising. What they said was that if robots can do it, it's not the practice of law. And by the way, it's worth noting that this issue then where they came up with this ruling, it wasn't something that was decided in the district court at the Southern District of New York. It wasn't something listed in any of the briefs before the court. They came up with this Sue Sponte. And so this is going to start showing how it is we, that the people who are in charge of the law, view this. And it impacts all of us. Now this is a chart, Dan Camps, who's really kind of a guru of law and analytics, over at Ida T. Kent in Chicago, talks about where he sees the future of the law. And he takes, you know, a block of 100 lawyers and he sees, you know, 70 lawyers in safe employment. And what he sees likely for the future is that there's going to be some changes. That a good portion of them will go on the job that he calls law and tech, or tech and law. It's going to be a very dramatic change. And that's a great path for some people. There are folks who can learn to code and bring that into their practices. But, you know, coding isn't always easy. And not all of us are real good at it. Some of us instead. Folks can make a lot more potentially with skill manufacturing. Or the trades, then they might with an artistry degree. Kind of not the wrong artistry degree. I love artistry. And so do I, because that's what I did. So for people like me, it's probably best that I try and stick around in this area. You know, you're not going to have to be a coder. But there's a problem with that. Because these boxes all look the same. That's obviously out of the chart. But they're not the same. Because remember our old friend, the power law curve. And so some of these folks in those boxes are happy. But others are not. And as you can see, there's a whole bunch who are left out. And so I filled it in. And what does that mean? Well, those are the folks who are not necessarily law and tech. Or tech and law, but more like law and unemployed. That's kind of what's at stake here. How do we find ourselves at the good spot in this power law curve? It's opposed to the bad spot, or even worse, law and unemployed. So I get it. This is probably somewhat depressing. And you're thinking, you know what, this guy is standing up here telling you it's time for you to welcome our new computer overlords. But I'm not. In fact, I'm not even here to talk about what it is to work with the computers. Because again, the robots don't want our jobs. The robots don't care if we work with them or not. Because yes, they're robots. This is about working better with people. Working with the people who are driving this process. Working with the people who are creating efficiencies. And it reminds me of a story of an event I was at earlier this year. And no more fancy pictures. We're just going to keep this up here to make it nice and steady. With the ABA, about an event where there is a panel about regulatory technology and how to adapt to it as lawyers. And there was a woman on the panel, a younger woman telling a story. This isn't GC at a big bank. About how one day she got a call from a regulator that we believe that your latest credit determination application system may have a disparate impact and may actually be discriminating against people. This is bad news if you're a bank. You don't want the government showing up and causing trouble like that. Because all bad things could happen. So she went to her IT people and said, hey, we need to talk about this. Tell me about this application and how it works. And what did they do? They handed her the code for it. Here, you figured out. Here's all the stuff. I don't know if they brought it in, but here it is. You figured out. And she pushed back in a respectful way, but she pushed back and said, no. I'm the lawyer. You're the tech guys. We're all here to work together. Let's sit down and figure out how this thing actually works and how we can best explain it to the government so that we don't have a problem. And it took some working with them, but she explained after a number of sessions, some weeks, she worked it out with them that she could understand what they did. And they could understand what she did and why it was everybody can understand why what each of them did was important. And in the end, yes, they managed to convince the government that no, their application was not discriminatory and the problem went away. That's the kind of future that I believe that folks who could otherwise find themselves at the wrong end of the curve or with those little skull and crossbone spots should be looking towards being better lawyers, understanding technology and working with the technology people. So thank you for attending this initial lightning talk. And if you'd like a copy of that larger article when it comes out, feel free to drop me a line at this address. And there you go. Thank you.