 Today, we're talking with MIT Computational Law Report board member, Kat Moon, about the make law better movement, and more generally about the impact of COVID-19 on law, the legal profession, and on you. This is something that's really taken the entire economy and the entire, all of our society by storm. There's big implications, and there's a lot of change happening. And there are some, there's a compass and a north star that we can look to to help us orient toward the type of change that would be most beneficial. And we think some of that is absolutely to be found in the make law better movement. And so I'm Dazza Greenwood, I'm executive director for the MIT Computational Law Report. I'm joined by Brian Wilson. Brian? Hi, everybody. Who are you? I'm Brian Wilson. I am a fellow in the Connection Science Research Group at MIT, but critically for purposes of this podcast, I am the editor-in-chief. And we're super excited to be joined by Kat Moon today, who devotees will remember that she has an article and released one of the report. But without getting too much into that right now and without bearing the lead more. That's a spoiler. Kat, can you tell us a little bit about the make law better movement, how it kind of came up, and what the goals of it are? Yeah, and maybe start us off for those people that are not fortunate enough yet to know you about your relationship with Vanderbilt and just who you are. Yes, so I will give you the thumbnail version so we can get into the more interesting things. So I teach at Vanderbilt Law School. Before that, I was a practicing lawyer for about 20 years, and I'm soon to be entering my fourth year of teaching at Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt alum, I'm a double door, so two degrees from Vanderbilt. And I also am the director of our executive education program, which is called the Polly Institute. And I'm the director of innovation design for the law school. And I teach specifically in Polly, which stands for the program on law and innovation. So in that role, I am charged with creating the curriculum for Polly. And so that is a whole lot of fun, because I get to just dig into what law students need to know to really be on the cutting edge of entering the 21st century practice of law. And I get to think about what we need to be teaching them that really supplements and complements their education in how to think like a lawyer. So I get to teach things like human-centered design. I recently rolled out legal operations. I teach a course in blockchain and smart contracts. I teach laws of business. I'm going to be teaching a course in leading innovation next year. That's what I'm rolling out next year. So it really is a whole lot of fun. And in doing this, I also get to work with really interesting and smart people like you too. And I really enjoy my role on the board with the report. And so it's really awesome to be here. Thank you for inviting me. We love having you. You know, you on the board and the people that we've been fortunate enough to attract have brought so much energy and so many good ideas and literally made it possible for us to have this report. But there's one other thing that you didn't mention that is also beloved. Aren't you a fellow legal hacker? Oh, I am. I'm so sorry. Yes, so I think actually my involvement in legal hackers. So I'm one of the organizers of Music City Legal Hackers, which is the Nashville Legal Hackers. I think we're the only. Yeah, Dalza, you've even visited us in Nashville. So I think and I think my involvement in legal hackers actually predates my teaching at Vanderbilt. So I've been a legal hacker for longer than I've been a law professor. And yeah, which is just a phenomenal group of people. And it has been incredible to watch the growth of that movement because I really consider it a movement. And yeah, it's been really one of my favorite things I've been involved in actually for the past few years. So yeah. Same here. Legal Hackers. LegalHackers.org. And so speaking of movements that are making law better, dot, dot, dot, tell us about the make law better movement. Yes. So again, I'll just try to kind of put it in a nutshell. I've been using the hashtag make law better on Twitter for more than a couple of years. And it really, for me, is a signal and really encapsulates what I personally am striving to do at this point in my career. And that is connect dots and facilitate and frankly provoke collaboration across this really wide spectrum of the legal profession and our legal systems to combine efforts and so that we can really maximize the work we're doing to make law better no matter where that falls on the spectrum. We have a wide spectrum of types of legal practice. We have a wide spectrum of frankly, legal systems. And we have amazing people, including all the legal hackers out there who are working really hard at their particular point in the spectrum to make things better. And I realized pretty quickly, especially once I started working at Vanderbilt and had the opportunity to connect with people doing amazing work literally around the globe, that we did not have an adequate release system for connecting people and connecting their work. And to this day, I still see folks who face a challenge over here creating from scratch, essentially reinventing the wheel a solution, often a technology solution, not always. And completely unaware that someone over here has actually already created a solution, which either might work perfectly or provides a starting point for improving and iterating. And this really was brought home, frankly, much more eloquently than I've been able to articulate. To me, when I saw Jim Sandman speak at the LSC technology conference in Portland in January, he really made a call to action. And specifically in the concept or in the world of applying technology to solve access to justice challenges. And he said, one thing we need is a platform that enables all the people doing this important work to connect in and share what they're doing so that others can learn from what we're doing. And so I've always envisioned to make law better being that kind of platform, that point of connection and cross-pollination. And so that idea planted as the COVID-19 pandemic started really impacting legal education, the practice of law, really everything, as we know. It occurred to me that this is an opportunity, this is a moment. And so what I realized is that we needed a way for all the people out there who have been doing these really innovative things in the law to make themselves known, to stand up and be counted and to say, I'm here, this is what I'm doing, these are the skills I have, this is the experience I have, this is the expertise, this is the passion. So one, for those people to stand up and say, I'm here, so we can see each other. Because to this day, even with legal hackers and other fantastic platforms, there are still a lot of us who don't know each other and we don't know about the work other people are doing. And so to make that connection, and frankly, it ultimately is a dare to all the people out there who have not embraced innovation and technology to make law better. Not for lack of good intention, but simply because they've been really comfortable with the status quo to see that there is this group of people, Jordan Furlong and a blog post actually called us an army of innovators. So there is this army of innovators that exists to help, to help everyone in this moment keep law open. So that's kind of my current hashtag. We want to hashtag keep law open ultimately to make law better. And so that was the immediate call to action is to make ourselves known. So people who need the help, frankly, know who to go to. And so if they choose to move forward and try to kind of frankly meddle through things without our help, you are choosing to ignore this army of innovators. And so it really in that way is frankly a dare, like ignore us and see that this is not going to go as well as it could. So that was really as simple as that. So the platform really intends to be a connection point, a point of cross-pollination, of collaboration for the people who gather there, frankly, to self-direct. I don't exist to tell people what to do or where to go or who to collaborate with. I exist to help people, to really to provoke people to be known and to find those places where they can plug in. And we have started, we're rolling out a couple of projects for people who want to be proactive and actually do something just to kind of push out into the world. We have one project, Keep Law Open Project 306090. And you can go to makelawbetter.org to kind of dig into what that is. But it really is kind of up to the people who can make a difference right now to stand up and say, I'm here and to refuse to not be ignored, frankly. That's awesome. Yeah. And I think there's a parallel here with something else that has had a ton of potential for a long time, but only really recently has had some of that potential realized. And I think that's with the sharing economy, right? Yes. There was this excess idle capacity that existed across the market with regard to people's goods, not being able to allocate them efficiently. I think there was a quote a long time ago, the average person maybe doesn't need a drill. Maybe they only actually need six holes. Yeah, right. But everybody has a drill. But everybody has a drill. Yeah. I think I have two with dead batteries somewhere in my house. Yeah. Well, I know. And so I think figuring out that coordination problem, solving that piece that makes it easy for the people who, they don't need a drill themselves. They just need a few holes. This is a way to make sure that that coordination takes place, that that coordination is maybe even standardized a little bit. So you're drilling. Everybody is drilling holes that are the same size and can be used in the same ways. And so I think from that standpoint, it's I think if this is something that gets the visibility that it should, it has a huge potential to take off and be a kind of way to effect real change. Right. May it be so. You know, that observation, Brian, I didn't know you were going to say that. It's not in the show notes. So just going with it. The idea of like focusing on what is the need six holes here so I can do some home improvement or something or whatever, build something. A good way to ask for that is to say the need is six holes, as opposed to presume the tool or the solution. And that made that put that connected a dot for me and something that you and I had done in the past, Kat, with the the extremely awesome music city legal hackathon, where the approach to innovation there was to work with I think in that case, it was several legal service providers in the region and then to help work with them to articulate a problem state. And the idea of the problem state was not to presume we need a telephone tree, but rather we need to do we need to have more scalable intake. Well, that could be a telephone tree. That could be a web form. That could be but basically to describe the problem agnostic to the solution and then bring in the little army of innovators who came for the hackathon to then brainstorm what are the best solutions and fits and and to make that match at that point. Yes, yes. So I think, yes, that's a great example, actually. And that that hackathon was such an amazing experience and in a couple of things were created that kind of went on to have a continued life out in the world. So that's so exciting to see. And I think a great example of the initiative that innovators as problem solvers can show one kind of human centered design twist on this I just like to point out. I think this is important both for the problem solvers and for the people who face the challenges that going back to the home improvement example, the person who needs the six holes though might not ever describe it as I need the six holes. They still might say I need the drill because that's their frame, right? That's how they framed the problem. I need a drill. And so what I've found often in working with people to help them solve problems, especially applying human centered design methods and tools, is that you've got to sit in the problem a little bit to actually figure out what is the real challenge that we're trying to solve here. And you've got to do that for a while before you start building solutions. And so I think that many of us who in this army of innovators are actually really good at that. And I think that's one of the skills that we bring that while we can sit and listen with the person with the challenge and hear them describe it and they can say, but I need you to help me buy a drill. I need you to help me find a drill because I need a drill. And we ultimately can walk away and say, all we need to do is figure out how to make those six holes. That's really all we have to do. And so I think that's frankly one of the real skills we have that we can bring to all of this if people know we exist and if people are willing to let us help. Those two are necessary kind of for this to work. Necessary conditions and a good prerequisite to achieve those conditions are if you're watching this now, share the video, get the word out. And the action people can take is go to makelawbetter.org. That's how you get involved. Yeah, so there are two things that you can do very clearly there. One, if you are someone who wants to help make law better, you can sign up to be an army of innovators. You don't have to be a lawyer. You don't even have to really be in the legal profession. You just have to want to help. So you just sign up. And the other thing there's a form, if you need help, if you are part of an agency, an organization, a law firm, what have you that needs help. And this is specifically really in this moment of crisis to help people figure out how can we create some solutions that are gonna keep law open? Because that's our immediate focus. And I will say the goal of makelawbetter as we emerge from this crisis, which we will, we don't know what it will look like on the other side, but as we emerge, the goal will be to really figure out how can we learn from those things that we tried, right? Because right now there are literally thousands of experiments in makelawbetter happening around the world. From courts going to video trials even. I just saw, actually I wanna make this plug. I just saw the Supreme Court of Michigan issued an order, I believe today, specifically authorizing the pilot of jury trials via video, right? We wanna see, does this work? And acknowledging by pilot, like this is an experiment. So these experiments are happening all over the world. Please God, hopefully someone is collecting this data meaningfully as it happens. And what are we learning from this? So what will we keep doing when the crisis has ended? What will we know that we need to do differently? What lessons do we take away? And so that really will be the next phase because I think to create this clearinghouse, right, of information so that as people, again, are really trying to solve very similar challenges, all points of the spectrum and frankly around the world, I travel often to other countries. And when I sit around a table with people in the legal profession in other countries and we talk about the challenges they face, the core elements are so incredibly universal that there truly is the opportunity to scale and leverage what someone tries over here with literally a challenge that's happening on the other side of the globe. And so, but we need that platform, right? We need that way for people to share this data and to interact with it and cross pollinate and collaborate. So, yeah, so help in the moment and then what are we gonna do with it going forward? Yeah, and I think there's a really cool element about having it as a platform and as this place to experiment that harkens to, one of the things that I think we've all felt about law is that we really are in this moment where it can be treated a little bit more scientifically. We can start treating it with measurement criteria. We can start setting goals ahead of time and then measuring those goals and kind of adapting them. And so I think, especially because law is a social science, this is a great opportunity to kind of like lean into that designation and actually live up to a lot of the potential that's out there to solve some of these big and scalable problems. Yeah. So, if I could add something, so one of the things that you'd mentioned that's very of the moment, like literally today with the Supreme Court holding or announcements about piloting jury trials online, you know, some, so Brian and I have been working with another board member, Brian Ulyssne, and gave Tenenbaum and others to start to kick around what might jury trials look like if they were online. We're just beginning to explore that. I think Richard Tuskend addressed that a little bit in the talk at Harvard today. Right. At Harvard Zoom? Yes. It's like what.zoom.com is where we're at now, you know. Right. But anyway, so I mean at the logical network sense, not the physical, TPS sense. At like, yeah. Yeah. But anyway, so some questions that, you know, that might arise are, you know, what would the success metrics look like? So a lot of times we think about blue-teaming things. So like how do we make it work? How do we make a nice user experience? Kind of a design-oriented thing. Another thing maybe to think about in as part of the design process is red-teaming online jury trials. So what are the, you know, five or six key attack surfaces or other failure points? And some of those will be technical. Some of them will be almost like business model-like and basic procedures. So how do you get the jury pull and how do you connect them? And how do you, you know, kind of, what are the rules of civil or criminal procedure going to look like? And then some of them may be almost constitutional. So at what, how much body language and how many other affordances, which affordances would be needed before we say it constitutes facing one's accuser or some of the other assumptions that underlie a jury trial of your peers? And so I think starting to surface some of the criteria upon which it would depend in a way that is objectively testable would be a big part of it. Absolutely. No, I agree with you. And I do think the red-teaming piece actually is critical to really designing an effective pilot and effective experiment, right? I mean, you know, from my perspective, innovation is absolutely necessary to move things forward because we are existing in systems that are products of the second industrial revolution. And as you all know well, we are currently living in the fourth industrial revolution. And I think it's just a matter of time before that evolves into the next phase, right? And so we're using tools and systems that simply don't work in the world we're living in. And so we see the fissures, we see the stress on the systems. And I think that the current crisis is revealing, frankly, how broken these systems are because they can't function in this world that really is simply relying on some of the best tools that have evolved, frankly, especially when you look from a technology standpoint and I mean even a computational standpoint if we look at the tools that are being used, right? That we now have to rely on because the old ways simply aren't possible. And I think that, you know, Susskind in his books, you know, raises a query, are courts a place or a service? Well, I think that everything in the legal system has now turned into a service because it cannot be a place. And so I think the opportunity now is if we accept that we have now the opportunity to gather this data from these experiments going on and also to think how do we leverage this going forward? What does this mean for a redesign of these systems? Then we do approach it actually in a very social scientific way. And we know that innovation requires experimentation. We have to try new things because we've not done anything different for a hundred years. And so, you know, what I get confounded at constantly are the people who refuse to change anything who say, well, we need data to show that that change will actually be a good idea. Well, if we don't ever do anything differently, we will never be able to gather the data to determine. And in the same breath, I wanna say to suggest that this would happen willy-nilly without great intention and great care, I think is ludicrous. And so I think it's really frankly, again, up to us, this army of innovators to say, look, we've actually been testing these things out for a long time in these different ways and to come forward and really say, here is a way that we can pilot this. Here is a prototype. Here is something that we can try and really make the case for why it has been designed in a way to eliminate as much as possible. We've done the red teaming. We are attempting to eliminate as much as possible all of the potential negative impacts. And this is a properly designed experiment. And the only way we're ever gonna change and make things better is to run the damn experiment and collect the data. Like it's just not possible any other way. And so, yeah. I collect the data according to a framework. According to a framework that allows us to, so there's data and there's data. We want good data. We don't want copy data. And what good means isn't just it looks good, it's not just structured. I've been a lot of projects where we collect a lot of data and there's a lot of activity. But one of the things that we're hoping to do is computational law report from an MIT engineering perspective and an MIT science perspective, like the science and data sciences, see what facets of the scientific method are really appropriate in order to understand what are we testing and what objective data and an objective criteria would be used to prove or disprove it. So that would be the rubric that would be really useful in the design of some of these tests to make sure that the answers are reliable and reliable enough for such a critical institution of the law governing our rights and opportunities. To make decisions on what a redesign looks like, absolutely. So you're gonna unveil that tomorrow, right? Of course, yeah, always. It's always tomorrow at the media lab. So something that you were just saying is like no. It's every day, every day we want to dream. Every day. We've got an expert system that'll just walk you through it. Oh yeah. At a chat interface. So there's a, so one way that was interpreting what you'd said a moment ago was in the law in particular, some other fields too, we're attempting to solve 21st century problems using 20th century tools, according to 19th century like business processes and training. And what we really need to do is to, you know, up rev the tools that we're using and the way that we work and the way we do them. And when I think about, you know, how does one do that? The first thing that comes to my mind, or one of the first things at least, is this whole concept of a Delta model lawyer. Well, thank you. Yes. You published about the Delta model lawyer and released one of the computational law report. Yes. But maybe everybody hasn't had the benefit yet of really understanding that. I was wondering if you could spend a moment to walk through what that is and how that could be relevant as part of this way forward. Absolutely. So again, kind of a nutshell version. So the Delta model lawyer for the Delta model for law year competency is a framework that attempts to identify the core skills and competencies that someone practicing law in the 21st century should possess. And so it is a triangle. So Delta representing kind of the triangle shape and also its connotation with change, right? So our underlying vision is that the 21st century model should reflect an evolution and change from that historical model for the practice that you were referring to a few minutes ago. Daza from being kind of a product of 19th century into 20th century system and education and practice, frankly, and ways of working so that there's the evolution, the change there. And we also view the model as agile in a couple of different ways. So one, we do not view it as a set it and forget it. We conducted independent research, original research. We also tapped into the existing research on what the core skills for good law yuring are. And there are a number of studies and groups that have looked into this over the past 20 years or so. So we looked at that and we recognize that change is happening so quickly in our world that we also have to go into this with a mindset that what's relevant to the Delta today could quickly evolve. And there could be things we can't even imagine yet that will be part of this holistic model. So three sides, the foundation is the practice of law. And we would view that everything that traditionally goes into what it means to be a lawyer historically. And so this is really the thinking like a lawyer. It's everything about the actual practice and doing the law. The right hand side is the process. And so that is everything really relevant to data, analytics, business operations, legal operations, human centered design, legal project management, all of those functions. And then the left hand side, people. So that those are all the human skills, the soft skills is there often unfortunately referred to. And so this encompasses things like collaboration, communication, emotional intelligence, the ability to regulate yourself, the ability to regulate your relationships with other people, frankly, often, especially in the independent research we conducted, things on the people side actually are rated higher than things on the practice foundation. There's really an assumption that if you get through law school and pass the bar specifically, then you are functional and competent on the foundation. And we'll continue to build on that. There is a recognition, a growing recognition that actually skills on the other two sides, frankly, are much more indicative of how successful you're gonna be, how much you're gonna thrive in the practice. The other way the model is agile is that it's not one single, there's not one single delta. We do not assume that every practicing legal professional has to have equal amounts of all the skills and competencies on all three sides. It's actually agile in that depending on the role you fill that will determine sort of what combination of skills and competencies are required because frankly different roles require different things. Someone who is an associate in a big law firm is actually going to leverage and thrive through using different skills and competencies than the combination required of someone is a solo practitioner, right? And so if someone is building a legal operations role that looks much different from a skills and competencies perspective than someone who is an appellate attorney. But all of these paths, all of these roles are possible to someone who emerges from law school with a JD. And so part of it is to really recognize that there is no one model, there is no one size fits all and can we design a framework that really has the agility and flexibility to help articulate those unique combinations of different roles. Which then helps people who aspire to certain roles or frankly fill certain roles understand, okay, here's the combination of competencies I need to do this particular job really well. And I'm not aware of any framework that's existed in the law up until now that really opens that black box. And I come to it very interested in this from the perspective of my students. I wanna help them really clearly understand what's gonna be required of them as they move into this profession and help them really understand, this is the role I want, I think what's it gonna take for me to get there, right? And then I think that we have an opportunity and frankly an obligation as we move through the profession to keep evolving. It's part of law year formation and law year development. So that's the Delta Internet show and I will kind of connect it to the current moment if you will permit me. I think what we are definitely seeing- You're gonna save us the trouble of asking the question because that's what we wanna get to. I'm just gonna go right there. I think in this current moment we are seeing evidence of how important the process and the people sides are to effective lawyering in this moment because also on the process side, all the technology skills, the technology skills you need as a lawyer to do your work, especially when suddenly the things you might have relied on in your cushy office are not available to you anymore. And also the skills and technology that you need to be a good counselor to your client. And I wanna stop on this point for a moment because I think this aspect of technology competence for practicing lawyers does not get enough attention. Many people, especially in sophisticated corporate practices are helping people who often have a larger problem of which there is a little element that is very interdependent on understanding technology. And I think that if you are going to counsel someone competently and effectively through such kind of challenge, you have an ethical obligation to have frankly more than just a passing understanding of the technology that is influencing and impacting the particular situation. So it's not just simply being able to use your own technology effectively to type a document or even automate something. I think it extends beyond that to understanding the technology that's relevant to your client's problems. That falls squarely on the process side of the Delta. And frankly, in this moment that is in so many ways all about our humanity and how we are managing through this just as people struggling through this crisis together, I'm convinced that if we are able to tease out the data in a meaningful way, the people who are thriving are those people who have highly developed skills on the people side. They're the ones who are really gonna come out of this if not stronger, at least not diminished the way others might, so. Yeah, I think that brings up a couple of things in my mind. You spoke a lot about the idea of kind of the specialization that, and I think the Delta model with all of its different configurations kind of enables a much deeper level of specialization in the legal industry than people previously had. One of the big problems with law school for a long time is that everybody's taught pretty much the same thing. They get through, they take the one same test and then everybody goes off and does a million different things. And that doesn't seem like a, I don't know, if we're designing for outcomes, I don't know that that is the way that we do it, but it also gets to this idea, the tech competency idea gets to this idea that I've loved and I've shared this love to DASA numerous times about Larry Lessig's Pathetic Dot Model. He really gets into the idea that law isn't just the way that law, like meta law, let's call it, trying to regulate certain behaviors from happening or incentivize things from not happening. That doesn't always look like a contract. If you have a contract that says you cannot steal, that's not going to be as effective as if you have an architecture, like for example, a safe, that doesn't allow you to get in to steal. And I think with some of the things that computers, code allows that all of these infrastructures that are much more advanced than the paper-based operating systems of the 19th century, I think those enable different kinds of law to happen and exploring those is one of the things that we're really excited about. And so I think this kind of is a way to feed the, getting people to understand how they fit within this Delta competency model is a way to feed the fire and get more of the innovators into a bigger army so that people can more efficiently solve the problem. Because one of the things back with specialization, when you had specialization with the assembly line that led to far greater outcomes than when people were just doing everything as one off. And so if we can kind of solve some of these coordination challenges by having that, we're in a much better position. Absolutely. And I think it's actually going to be critical to us really turning things around, frankly. Both frankly in the law and from an economic standpoint more widely, although that topic actually far exceeds our purpose today. I don't want our brains exploding at this point, but yeah. That would be a tort and we would need a special lawyer, a pretty special lawyer for that. I'm pretty sure we could do a cross claim against Zoom as a defendant if they were directly responsible for a brain explosion event. But there is some, there is an aspect though of it that I think we can focus our minds on safely, which is, so this pandemic obviously has turned everything upside down, a lot of assumptions no longer hold. And a lot of, that includes a lot of mistaken assumptions. So in the law, there's been a lot of stagnant, I was like barnacles of ideas from the past that are no longer accurate about what is possible or even desirable with, for example, technology and computational methods. I think we've jealously guarded our old school ways of doing things and the idea of the guild's mentality has been around and it's one of the factors which has created some resistance. We couldn't do things with clients on video, we can't share documents, we can't do things through computer networks the way they do another. Well, guess what? Like now we have definitely demonstrated that not only can we, but we must. And so one of the questions, one of the questions, I know, so we have a big report from the computational law report, big news, the law has gone online. And so what is that? We've been able to keep law open, right? The paper based operating system lost to the game of rock, paper, scissors to technology. It lost it to the pandemic. Boom. And so now the question is, I think, or a question is, so what are the implications of COVID-19? There's many direct implications, in terms of saving lives, getting people to services they need who are dislocated. But there's a second order as well, related to the profession and the practice of law, this time of transformation. And so it seems like there's a particular, this is a particular moment for computational law. And the question really is not, what can we do? Or what is the first thing on the vendor list that would achieve the drill, as opposed to filling six holes? But what should we do? And why? What is the North Star? And how do we correctly refactor the requirements and the outcomes of what we seek with good legal counsel and practice through these tools? Now that we finally have this moment, for the possibility of change that can endure. So, you know, I see this really as an opportunity for those of us who have been thinking about this, frankly, for quite a long time, right? To stand up and really be loud, frankly. And assert and insert ourselves into these decisions wherever and however we can. You know, I was supposed to host a gathering at Vanderbilt in July called Subtech. And so this is an event that's been happening every two years, since the 1990s. And it might be actually one of the earliest sort of technology in the law conferences. And a primary purpose is to really investigate what is the substantive technology that can assist in educating tomorrow's lawyers. And so this is not the law of technology, but it is really what is the technology of law, okay? And so in preparing to host this, and it's an unconference. So really the people who come together are responsible for deciding what are we gonna explore in this iteration of Subtech? And I can tell you, when you look back at sort of what's happened at past Subtech gatherings, which happened one year they happened in the US and two years later they happened somewhere else in the world. And so I went to my first one in Estonia in 2018, which was a fabulous experience because Estonia was doing some frankly, some really interesting things with technology and their governmental structure and their laws and different things. And so it was really interesting to see some of the people and hear from some of the people who are involved firsthand in these things. It's also a beautiful country as well. Tallinn was a beautiful place to visit. So I just wanted to say the next time you can travel, hopefully sooner than later, put that on your list. But what I realized in kind of trying to surface, what is our theme gonna be for this year? What can we talk about differently? Like these folks, like there are such common themes. People have been talking about the same things for 20 years and 30 years. And I think part of the problem is that not that these folks have been doing these things into a void or been completely ignored or what have you, but someone being in legal education, the impact has been pretty damn minimal. There are a lot of things that people have been doing, whether it's just to automate simple processes in law that would not only make lawyers more efficient but actually give the people we serve better access. These simple things people have been doing for a long time, but they simply haven't caught on. Like people can, so this is my new phrase, people can remain comfortable wrapped tightly in their blanket of hubris, which is what I call the status quo because we have this confidence that we are the guild and this is the way we've always done it and we don't have to change, so we're not going to. And so you have all these outliers on the side who have been trying to make these things happen for decades, folks, decades. And we could have the same conversation at Subtech where it to happen in July at Vanderbilt this year that someone had 20 years ago about trying to introduce a certain thing into the law school curriculum that's had made absolutely no headway. And so my question is, again, if we are seeing these cracks created in the current moment because people are having to do certain things because the law has moved online, because it's now recognized that it is a service because guess what, we're still doing it even though we're not in our places. Then the same, you know, courts, law firms, law schools, it's all still happening, right? Because it has to. In-house counsel are working from home. Yeah, exactly. Law firms are online. They are a distributed network. They're literally in-house, but yeah, law firms are now a distributed network of people collaborating to deliver a service. Well, that's all they've ever been. They've just happened to feel like they have to go to a building to do it, right? So I see, you know, these small cracks have formed. People are having to do things. The sky's not falling. They realize they can get, and I think some people are recognizing that there is value to be had, right? So how do we leverage that? How do we take the small cracks? How do we, you know, wedge them wider? How do we get in? And I'll borrow another image that Jordan Furlong shared on Twitter, which I really like to describe this moment. So Jordan, I'm paraphrasing, but basically he said, look, legal innovators have been knocking on the door of law, you know, for a long time, saying please let us in, let us help. Well, now, thanks to the pandemic, the door has been flung open from the inside and we're like all falling through the door, right? Like we're in. Okay, what are we gonna do? What, indeed. Oh, sorry, go on. Yeah, I was gonna say. So I think that that is, you know, that's part of the opportunity. You've now fallen through the door to help the person who thinks they need a drill that really needs its holes. What are you gonna do? Brian, could you speak a little bit to this whole generation of cool apps, like Legal Hacks and other rapid apps that have been growing up around the world, but in particular with some teams that we work with around the country that have been developing all these sets of, well, we did one, I know Joshua Browder has recently come up with a really interesting tool to help people file for unemployment. It works in all 50 states domestically, but then there's all these law school little, like armies of cadets, if not yet, you know, soldiers in the army who have been coming up with apps and projects as part of the curriculum to address real needs that have arisen during the pandemic. Yeah, so there is a, so I wanna touch on the Joshua Browder thing because I think it speaks to something that we mentioned in the first part of this podcast where it's not, we don't want to just design for the, you know, we don't wanna just design the 19th century for the 19th century, right? We can do better than that, but one of the really brilliant things about his app to file the unemployment claims is that it actually generates a paper letter to go to the IRS. Right. And it's much more efficient than if they would try to automate the online forms, which is very mind boggling. Yeah. But that's, that's the, There you have it. Yeah. Yeah, it's an interview with COVID-19. But no, One of the modules from, one of the modules from the document assembly open source that we love. Yeah, so, yeah, that's, It's a generator facts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Doc Assemble has a, Doc Assemble has a, yeah. Yeah. It's awesome. And so it's like, you know, there's definitely a value to meeting people where they are, but I think having the wherewithal to design, you know, some of that in such a way that makes, you know, these components more modular and more interoperable is something that I think can be very long-term valuable. And we're seeing pieces of that now with some of the apps that Deza was mentioning. I know that David Calaruso and some of the full set, the Suffolk Lit Lab, they're doing a document automation assembly line project that's using Doc Assemble. And they've got a great community and we can link to them in the show notes. And then Jeanette Ikes, her class at Vanderbilt Law, or at Vermont Law, yeah. Another V, another VLS, yes. Yeah. Probably other VLS, I can think of. They have, for a class that she's doing, they had demos where they just kind of spun these apps up in a matter of weeks using community.lawyer who they came and helped with our IAP course and did a lecture there, but they've got an app to request rent relief. They've got an app to generate a, I forget, a protective order for domestic violence victims. They've got other apps. I think one was actually to help automate some of the unemployment stuff, but we can link to those as well. And we've actually been in conversations with them and they're hoping to have a, maybe something like a resources page where we can not only have all this great list of apps, but actually have a, some of the background about, how did you guys drill your holes so that they could be replicated for everybody? Because that's the great thing about these apps now is that you just build the rent relief letter requester one time. And if you make it general enough, everybody in all these different states can adopt it. Every one of these different countries can adopt it and kind of modify it. Yes. Something like a Git version control approach so that you can see who's updating it where, why they're updating it, what conditions they're accounting for. And there's so much potential there to replace the collective knowledge of law with something that's less like encyclopedia Britannica and more like Wikipedia. Yeah. And if we're able to do that, we're able to open up so much opportunity that I don't think would have ever been realized without the really swift kick in the behind to get through the door of the crisis. Yeah, the impetus. Yeah. So I'm so glad you mentioned Jeanette's class at Vermont because I actually promoted that those, the demonstrations were actually open. And so I promoted that opportunity on the make all better news blog, which by the way, for that purpose. So folks who have projects they're working on can just shoot me an email and I'm happy to push that out to the world to let people know, to amplify what people are doing and what you were describing about actually trying to capture the useful data from those kinds of experiments. That's really what we envision for make all better in terms of making this platform useful for sharing information is to really kind of have a sort of case study format structure so that we're extracting from people some really useful contextual information that can then be used to go forward and through the process so that folks again aren't reinventing the wheel. Like take the part of this that is useful for you and plug it in, right? And in that this is, it seems so obvious, but gosh, the things that people now are doing today in the law, I've been doing for a dozen years. Right, yeah. And if you told me it would be 2020 before some of these things happened, when I was doing them regularly in 2010, I would have laughed in your face. And, but yet, here we are. Yeah, here we are. So I think that's a great example and yeah, we were spurred by this moment for these things to be created and spun out. So yeah, let's figure out a way to capture this stuff, right? We've got to get this stuff and make it accessible so that people can use it. And that's a perfect segue to where we wanted to kind of land in the podcast which is to talk with you a little bit about where we go from here and, you know, what's next? Well, first of all, in the roadmap for Make Law Better, what do you think is next, maybe more generally, what do you see coming kind of down the pike as we say? What do you, if you have any predictions or trends, but in general, just as we look to the future, what do you see? So first I, you know, I am an optimistic person and while my optimism is regularly challenged specifically in these times for all the reasons that we all are struggling a little bit or a lot depending on your situation right now, you know, I'm optimistic in this moment because I think that there is growing awareness among leaders and people who can wield power, that there is a true opportunity in this moment to not just make changes that get us through the crisis, but actually to think about systemic and structural changes that are required to really make our systems functional. And a couple of specific examples, if you look at Chief Justice McCormick who is Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and if you, I've got a link on the Make Law Better News vlog, if you wanna dive in, it's one of the articles that I've posted not too long ago but they have done just a really tremendous job of saying here's what we're gonna do to keep our courts open and they are coming up with guidelines and mispractices and really valuable information and pushing it out to all of their courts across the state so that folks who've not had to do this before actually have a playbook, like here's what you do, here's how we're gonna do it and this isn't gonna be perfect, but we're gonna do it and we're gonna figure it out and we're gonna iterate as we go along and Justice McCormick was named as one of the women of legal tech by the AVA in 2020 deservedly so because I think she is, she's not just technologically savvy but she really understands the important role that technology plays in creating access and creating a court system that truly serves the people and so I think that she's walking the walk in this moment and I mentioned the order that went down today saying we are going to pilot jury trials virtually because we have to in this moment, we can't just stop doing what we're charged to do because we can't all be in the same place together so I also have been involved in this little kind of ad hoc working group that was assembled to assist the Minister of Justice for Alberta, Canada and so as every other court system in the world is facing the folks in Alberta can't function the way they have been and they recognize that things weren't functioning well going into this like a tremendous backlog of cases, a system that self-represented litigants cannot navigate so we've got to do things in the immediate term how can we do them in a way that actually will serve us and make things better going forward and what steps can we take today that actually lay the groundwork for some structural changes going forward and he's getting buy-in from all the judges across the different levels of the court system in Alberta to really think about what are these things and to embrace doing them so those are two I think obvious examples of thinking beyond the immediate moment and really trying to take advantage of the forced open-mindedness that people have in this moment so and again I will put responsibility back on the full range of people in this system so people who are part of the army of innovators who are passionate about making law better wherever they fall in the spectrum whether they are serving big law or trying to create access to justice or anywhere in the middle now is your moment to shine what do you bring to the table who can you send an email to knock on a medical portal door what Zoom room can you show up in to say this is what I do this is what I bring to it and I wanna help you and I'm gonna help you and let me help you so I think we have that obligation and then frankly ultimately the people who have the power to make different choices because I believe this we know this is true our current failing systems are a choice and yes it is an incredibly complicated hard difficult job to undo and redesign and make new systems I'm not suggesting that this is some easy thing that's gonna happen poof overnight even in the face of a pandemic however every person who sits in a point of making a decision if they choose not to try to make things better by changing something that is a choice when we choose to continue to wear our comfy blanket of hubris and say but we know what we get even if we know it's broken and just look at the data broken like all it shows is how broken things are so it is a choice to say I'm not gonna listen to the people who have really good ideas about how we solve these problems I'm not gonna let them help us that is a choice and I think that we have to dare every person who has the power to make a difference to refuse to accept the help because that's essentially what they've been doing up until now and so I think that it's incumbent upon all of us to push and pull levers wherever we are and be noisy, be loud. Very good. Well, and so the one final question I think that we've got you talked about at least chronologically I think this question flows I don't know if it's the final question or not. I thought the last question was the final question so what do I know? Okay, so this is a one. This is a bonus, it's the bonus round. Bonus question. You talked very quickly about 10 years ago you couldn't have imagined that you'd be sitting here now and these things wouldn't have changed and I just wanna, if you can pick one thing that is solved by the year 2030, what thing do you pick? I want a thing that makes our system of justice and I'm gonna refer specifically to civil justice because I think it's frankly the easier thing to fix. I want a system of civil justice that is user centered and user friendly and I want a system that people actually come to to meaningfully and quickly and efficiently solve their problems and that system is possible. We created the current system. It is by and for lawyers. We can create a system that is by and for the people. That's the largest stakeholder group and it is frankly the most excluded and we can look at the civil resolution tribunal. I think I have that right, CRT in British Columbia which Shannon Salter runs. I think is a fantastic example of really not a highly technologically advanced system. I wanna say I heard that it was built on Salesforce but it has created a method and a process that people understand and can use themselves and for the most part excludes lawyers and judges completely and people solve their problems and they have an incredibly high user approval rating. You know why? You know how that I know that? Because they actually ask people, how was this process for you? How satisfied are you with this process? And when they get negative back, they go back and say, okay, what can we do better so that a person doesn't have this challenge again? We can do that. It is a choice not to. And frankly, I want to shame the people who do not want to make the change that makes that possible. And so that's what I wanna see in 2030, that's it. Very interesting, yeah. So you make the point that we don't have a place now for like for example, for the judicial system or a courtroom but it's a service. But what you just mentioned from the Canadian experience creating this kind of a platform and suggest that maybe what we need is a space. Yes, yes. And so there is a space, it's not individual workflows and forms and like that or even an API that you can do a process through. But maybe what we're looking for in like a 2030 horizon would be something like a justice space that jurisdictions could provide within which the methods and mechanisms exist for people to do their dispute resolution and to find recourse to exert the rights. Yes, I think that conceptualizing as a space is a good way. I mean, I think we as humans, we are community oriented animals, right? Like we come together. That's one reason social distancing is so hard. It's like we actually want to be with other people. And so I think it's not necessarily replicating that kind of in-person experience, but it is creating a sense of space in place and frankly community around that objective, right? So I love the way that you frame that. I agree. Here's to justice space 2030. Justice space 2030, all right, you're here. And the gauntlet has been thrown down. So the challenge has been made. The dare has been, has been dared. Big dare, man. Here we go. Well, I know I've been looking forward to this as you call all day, partly because we are social animals and I thought, oh good, we get to cap this day off with a nice conversation with Cat Moon. And thank God we have these tools now so that we're able to make the most of this time of physical isolation. But it can still be personal connection. So I hope, I wanna thank you for taking the time out of your, I know you're juggling like five different full-time things that you're wearing right now. Well, the great thing is I've had dinner in the oven the whole time we've been talking so it's smelling really good right now. So perfect timing. That's a problem. Right? What is it? You guys tell us what it is. We're gonna have some salmon and baked potatoes. And I think I'm gonna roast, I haven't done this part yet. I think I'm gonna roast some brussel sprouts with a little chorizo. Oh, there you go. That's what I'm thinking. That sounds solid. That's kind of like, you gotta add that to your recipe. I know. I, this is a- You're collecting recipes? Yeah. We've been out of some ag defile. I've got a- I love it. I've been putting together a recipe list for a very long time. And so maybe that'll get published sometime during this quarantine. That'd be good. So that everybody else can have it. I love it. I love it. On Saturdays I make my Wilson chicken with mustard and whatever. It's easy to follow. Awesome. Great, so we hope that this has been good food for your minds and for your aspirations out there in internet land. And come and check back with us again at law.mit.edu to keep following the great work of our board members and our authors and plant yourself down at makelawbetter.org to join this army of innovators. And so thanks again and wanna wish you well until next time. Bye y'all. See ya. Thanks.