 five courses over six weeks is that there'll be a guest who's going to come in and talk about something that they do with regard to law and innovation. And then there's going to be an opportunity for us collectively to interact with that person. But I want to talk about the themes that we hope to hit this semester to try to frame a little. So the first theme is the importance of using technology to deliver better legal services. So there's sort of twin problems in legal services. On the low-income end, there are millions of millions of American people who can't effectively afford access to legal services. Now, the traditional solution to that has been to hire more legal aid attorneys. Those are people that give up themselves and they work for relatively low wages and they help poor people with problems. Now, there simply aren't enough of those folks. And even if we were to double or triple or multiply the budget that's given to the legal aid by 10, there still wouldn't be enough legal aid attorneys to handle the legal aid problems that people have. And these problems are serious. Divorce, landlord-tenant problems, problems with illness caused by environmental conditions. We have the right to an attorney when they're criminal defendants. But if they want to be civil plaintiffs in a case, if they want to sue someone for wronging them, they have no right whatsoever to do that. So we have this one problem on the low-income end. How are we going to help all of those people meaningfully get access to access their legal rights in good ways? It's a problem on the other end of things too. So for years, the legal market has been dictated by large law firms. Large law firms pay a lot of money for themselves but don't do a very good job of meeting middle-income clients. So there's a stat that I'm always interested when there's new data on. And the most recent data point I've seen is $300 billion. And that's the estimate for the latent legal market in the United States. Latent legal market has defined as people who are in need of some sort of legal services would like to buy some sort of legal services but there's just no price point that they're able to make. So there's about $300 billion where people rather than dealing with a legal problem, they don't have a will, they should get one, they know it, they just don't deal with it. It's just money left on the table. And one of the solutions that can potentially feel part of that gap is the use of technology, using smart technologies to bring the cost down of providing needed legal services for people. So that's one important theme that we wanna think about. How to make it so that poor people get better access, how to make it so that people who are more adequate means want to pay for legal services and one of the ways to do that is technology. The second that we wanna think about is the set of technologies out there that have the possibility of absolutely revolutionizing the way that we approach legal problems. So the two that we'll highlight in weeks, two and three of this class are artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies. So in terms of artificial intelligence, there's an open question as to if we can train AI to do a significant high-level portion of the work traditionally paid legal professionals are asked to do. And in so doing, just create a world that's more efficient for people to get access and to resolve legal problems in my mind. Blockchain in theory could rewire the whole plumbing of how people communicate in the legal world. They could change or blockchain technology could change the way that we record information for an important part of law. So we'll hear from speakers who are experts in those areas about what they envision, the challenges that you see and they'll invite you to think about how you might get involved. The third are the challenges that these new technologies bring to existing regulatory schemes. So one of the things I always tell people when I talk about what I do is I say, I'm a technology of law guy, not a law of technology guy. In other words, I know something about the tools that make people better at delivering legal services. But the thing I'm less familiar with, frankly, is how those changes will impact the law. In other words, our current legal system isn't necessarily built to exist in a world where there are automated tools. Let me give you one example and Dean Perlman I think will probably talk about this and talk about this later. It's illegal, it's unlawful for someone who's not a licensed attorney to offer legal advice. Well, what happens when someone creates a tool that effectively serves as a chat button, answers a series of questions for people and effectively tells them how to behave in litigation? We have a regulatory problem there because traditionally that's work that's been reserved for real-life human being lawyers who went and got a Jamie and passed a bar. But now we have tools that can arguably do it just as effectively at least in some contexts and do it at lower no cost. So there's a whole set of regulatory challenges that arise here. And one of the wonderful things about being in the MIT environment is one of the things that folks are encouraged to do here is not just think about little pursuit in me, but how we could start again, pull the anew and reinvent the system that would account for this technology to make work better. So those are the three main themes that we're gonna talk about over the next few weeks. And today's speaker is someone that knows all about those themes. So let me just talk a little bit about Dean Andy Perlman who's gonna give a presentation just a few minutes. So Dean Perlman is the Dean of Suffolk University Law School and he was also and has also been deeply involved in the regulation of attorneys over the course of his career. He was the chief reporter of the ABA's 2020 ethics commission which changed the ethical rules to reflect the need to understand and to be confident in technology. He was the vice chair of the ABA's commission on the future of legal services. He was appointed by the ABA president, the chair of the governor and council of the ABA's Center on Innovation. He started the Institute on Law Practice, Technology and Innovation at Suffolk Law. I succeeded him in that role, but he was the first law school professor to effectively say, we need an entire program in technology and innovation. So today he's gonna come and share with us some of that deep knowledge that he's got in terms of thinking about technology, innovation and the role of those in legal services. So Andy, thank you for being here. So before I jump in, I want to highlight something that Professor Tenenbaum mentioned, which is the difference between the technology of law and the law of technology. Because to understand what we mean when we say future law, it's important to understand that distinction. Traditionally, when we think about innovation and law, we think about innovation in companies and businesses and industries that are out there and there are regulatory and legal infrastructure that affects what they do. Let's say patent law or trademark law or a wide range of legal issues that entrepreneurs in innovator space. This is for all intents and purposes, the law of innovation or the law of technology and innovation. Very important and I'm sure you're gonna touch on those issues in this course. What I'm very interested in is the flip of that. The law of technology and innovation of law. So instead of the technology, I should say the law of technology, I'm interested in the technology and innovation of law practice. How do we deliver legal services in new ways? Because for all of the reasons that you heard, not being delivered in the way that they're called machines, legal services are too expensive and there is a desperate need to innovate the way that the public receives the legal services that they so desperately want and don't want to have to overpay for. So that's what I mean when I say that I wanna think through what kinds of changes do we need to bring about in the delivery of legal services? Okay, so that's what I'm gonna talk about. But I think to understand future while we need to take steps backwards and think about where we've come from, the way that legal services have traditionally been delivered looks a little like what you see on the screen. A couple of old guys sitting around a table with some papers in their hands and some books on the shelves. That's what we think of, that's the popular imagination of legal services delivery. And there are certain words that come to mind when we think about the way that legal services were delivered in the past. Papers, books, people went to trial a lot, you know, and we watch movies about legal services, you see people standing in a courtroom. Typically, lawyers practice alone by far the most common practice setting was a solo practice setting, a single lawyer, and they were generalists. They handled anything that came through the door and they handled it from soup to nuts. There was no specialization, there was no outsourcing, there was no getting it to an associate. Lawyers did it all. So that's the way legal services were delivered a century ago. But when we think about legal services today, there's an entirely new vocabulary that comes to mind. And whether you're lawyers or law students or people who are just interested in the subject, some of these terms will be familiar to you, many of the terms will be familiar, and they are starting to make their way into the delivery of legal services and they can best be characterized by the two words of rapid change. So in light of these rapid changes that are taking place in the legal industry and the delivery of legal services, the question that I am often asked is what is the typical lawyer reaction? Now I am a professor by training and I like multiple choice questions and this one has only two possible answers so it will make it easy on you. So is the typical lawyer reaction like this? Bonus points for anyone who can name the character. In his Borg form. Thank you, thank you. Locutus support. Locutus support. If I figured there was any audience, that would be the answer to this question. It's not for an MIT, so I'm very grateful. I'd say legally that person is not the card and could not be charged as the card. Okay. I'm a crime. Okay, raises a different set of legal issues. Thank you for seeing them up. So yeah, so do lawyers equip themselves to become one with technology? In fact, everything that they do or the other possible answer is this? With the heads in the sand. I can tell you when I give this presentation to a room full of lawyers, there's widespread laughter about the second option and the reason there's so much laughter is it's a sense of recognition that this is the most common reaction that lawyers have when they see the world changing around them, when they see so much use of technology and innovation, they are not really changing. The question is why? Why is the legal profession so slow to change? And here is where I am going to take some of the blame and when I say I, I mean law schools and legal education in general. And here again, I want to take us back in time. It's important for those of you who are not lawyers to understand a little bit about legal education that will help you understand why the profession is so slow to change and why there are so many issues of the sort that Professor Tannenbaum referenced. So let's go back more than 100 years ago and think about the way that lawyers were trained at the time of that opening slide with the two old guys sitting around the table. So legal education in the past was pioneered by this gentleman here, Christopher Columbus Langdell at a law school, not so far away from here. And prior to Langdell's innovation, the way that lawyers were trained was either they had an apprenticeship, they worked for a lawyer and they learned the way that it was done or they simply learned the law by reading what were called treatises. They read descriptions of law, but not the actual primary material, not the law itself. It just described the legal, what's called legal doctrine. What Langdell came up with was a new approach. He said, why don't we have law students read cases that is court opinions and be able to teach those students how to extract principles from those cases and then apply principles to a new set of facts they've never seen before. This was known as the case method of legal instruction and it's spread to just about every law school in the country. Now let's fast forward from Langdell's time, that was more than a hundred years ago and ask the question, what does legal education look like today? Well, here's the answer. It looks pretty much like the same guy, Christopher Columbus Langdell. Now to be fair to law schools and there's nobody who wants to be more fair to law schools than the dean of one. We have pushed Langdell off to the side and we have incorporated new doctrines, new courses, new substantive areas of law and we've also introduced new skills, more legal writing training, clinical courses where students are trained to represent clients in real situations, all very important developments in legal education. But at the end of the day, students are still trained to look backwards. The law is inherently backwards looking, it's about precedence and the way things were done in the past rather than looking to the future. So here's a quote by Hockey Great Wayne Gretzky. See to where the puck's going, not where it is right now. And there's a legal futurist, a guy named Richard Susskin who uses this quote to make the point about what we need to do with regard to the future of legal services. And I think it's a wonderful concept. But you might ask, this is about future law and it's about where the puck is going. We need to understand where that puck is actually going. Now understand that, there's this picture, this image that Richard Susskin put in his book, The End of Warriors, and I've used his British spelling here. And I'm gonna walk through this with you because I think you really need to understand it in order to see where services are going in the future and to truly understand the future of law. Let's start with bespoke. How many of you are familiar with this term bespoke? Only a small number of you. It's a British phrase, needs highly tailored custom approach. So oftentimes used in the context of clothes. If you're going to buy a bespoke suit, you've got a tailor who takes your measurements and cracks a perfectly tailored suit for your needs. So in case you are curious, this unfortunately is not a bespoke suit. But you can buy one and they're more expensive. That's the point because they are custom tailored. Now, legal services historically are bespoke in the sense that there is a client who has a need, comes in to a lawyer and goes through a very custom tailored process to deliver the services that that client needs, questions and answers, and developing the ultimate service for that client. Now, as a particular service is delivered more routinely, you can standardize some features of it while often involves documents, whether it's a litigation dispute between parties or a kind of transaction. Very often there's a document that's needed or many documents that are needed. And those can be systemized or should say standardized. Certain phrases, certain clauses, certain sentences, maybe even entire documents, might look the same from one legal matter to the next. So instead of being bespoke, you can standardize certain features of the service. Over time, those services, those documents can be systematized. That is they can be created in a much more efficient way so that you don't have to do it over and over again in a custom highly tailored approach. And of course, when you do that, you can drive down the cost of the legal service. Eventually, it becomes so easy to create and deliver that service that you can turn it around, make it available to the public and allow the public to do it on its own. This is a package legal service. And at some point, the service is so easy to generate, so costless to produce that it is for all intents and purposes, a commodity. So let me give you an example of one service that I think has gone through this transition. If it's not there yet, it's getting pretty close, which is the creation of a basic will. Whether you've gone to law school or not, you understand what a will is. Now to create one used to be a largely bespoke process. You would have to go into a lawyer, physically go into a lawyer. The lawyer would ask a variety of questions and based on the answers to those questions, draft a will. And the drafting of a will was done on a typewriter from scratch. Now maybe you would have certain standardized features in that will, but for the most part it was done from scratch each and every time it was a largely bespoke process. And it's not so long ago that that was the case. Let's benchmark it around 1980. Now let's fast forward from 1980 to today. I think what you find is basic wills if they are not a commodity yet, they are rapidly approaching it. I do not advise any law students in the room, and I see a few to go into a practice where the primary way of earning a living is generating basic wills for individuals. That is not going to be around for much longer and there's not going to be much money to be made in it. Now let's think about transactions and wills are a sort of transactional service more generally. What we're finding is a splintering of the marketplace where legal services, transactional legal services are being delivered at different points along the spectrum that I just described. So on the commoditized end, not just basic wills, but if you wanted to incorporate a small business, you could do that on your own. Government websites have the forms that you need. There is just not much money to be made from incorporating a small business. Now let's move one step up. How many of you have heard of LegalZoom? I'm not surprised. They are the most recognized legal brand in the United States, more recognized than any law firm and they are now law firm. They are a company. We can get into a wide range of regulatory issues that were referenced before and if people have questions about it, happy to talk about it. But what LegalZoom is, is really a package legal services provider, right? They have taken all of the legal knowledge, they have turned it around with a public access on its own for a fee. So they're a package legal service provider and they deliver a wide range of transactional services to people who want them at a very low cost. So innovation is driving down the cost through largely automated document assembly. Now let's go one step up from that. So standardize. Great example here are closings, real estate closings. So what you could do is use technology. It used to be the case you would have to generate document after document. How many of you have either bought a home or rebuy a number of you? If you've gone through that process, you see oftentimes a large stack of documents that you have to go through. To produce that large stack of documents without technology would be very resource intensive, take a lot of time and be costly, unnecessarily costly. And so what some innovators have done is use technology to standardize that process, driving down the cost of real estate closings. We actually happen to have one of them in the class here, Costa Ligras, who built a business around that concept and as a result is one of the leading providers in New England, I took so far as to say the leading provider, am I overstating? Okay, very good. And so he's done that through the standardization or I should say systemization of the delivery of certain kind of legal services. So there's still considerable money that could be made if you know how to use the technology to drive down those costs. So that's an example of future law through the standardization of documents. The problem is the legal profession because of the training that we go through continues to blind us from these other possibilities and we deliver them with services primarily this way. Even though there are all of these opportunities at different points along this spectrum. And same is true for what is known as litigation or dispute resolution. We're seeing a splintering here as well. Let me give you an example of a commoditized legal services provider in the dispute resolution realm and that is Modria. How many of you have heard of Modria? I'm not surprised. There's only one hand that went up. And this is the surprising aspect of the lack of recognition of who Modria is or what Modria is, is that they resolve more disputes in the United States than the entire US court system combined. Which is a remarkable statement. So you might have to wonder what is Modria? Well Modria was created to help resolve disputes on eBay and PayPal. So let me give you an example of what Modria does. A few years ago I bought a television at Best Buy and I received the Best Buy gift card that I didn't meet. So I decided to sell it on eBay. Put it up, somebody bought it. I put the gift card in an envelope, a stamp on it, put it in the mail after I got paid of course. And then a week later the person claimed, what's up, why didn't you send me the gift card? I said, well I did, I put it in the mail. And the person said, well I want my money back. I checked into the gift card that had been inspected. So I was lost somewhere on some dark corner of the mail room. So how do we resolve it? There wasn't enough money at stake to go hire a lawyer or own a small claims court. What Modria did was build an online dispute resolution platform for eBay and PayPal so that consumers could resolve their own disputes in an automated web. Through what is called an expert system tool of branching questions and answers that ultimately lead to an outcome. In my case, we went through this process and I was ultimately asked the question, did I have any evidence that I had sent this gift card in the mail? In turn we'll see anything. The answer was no, because I stuck the gift card so that any in an envelope put it in the mail. And according to eBay's terms of service, this means I'm out of luck and I have to give the buyer the money back. I can tell you as a former trial lawyer myself, this was a period to have lost this particular dispute. But I also can tell you that I thought the outcome was fair. It was fair because I felt that the policies were pretty clear and it was my fault for not actually documenting that I had sent it. But it's a wonderful example of a commoditized delivery of a dispute resolution process. Court kiosks in courthouse, we're seeing them more often. They are packaged in a sense, they are outward facing, they are giving the public the services that they need in a different kind of way. Lawyers who do dispute resolution are frequently producing documents called pleadings and discovery, all of that, or much of that now can be automated and systematized. But once again, lawyers who are engaged in dispute resolution work think in largely bespoke ways. And even at the bespoke level, there are some changes taking place. And later in this course, you're gonna be learning about AI and blockchain as they might apply to legal services. And we're still at very early days in terms of this. IBM Watson has a legal division that's doing work in this area and they're developing a number of possible solutions. Time will tell what that all looks like and the impact that it will have on the delivery of legal services. But there are already some indication that some of the largest clients and companies in the world are trying to take advantage of AI to rapidly reduce the cost of some kinds of legal services that they need. Bottom line, from my perspective, legal services, future law, it all needs to be rethought. We need to be thinking outside of the bespoke box. So what are law firms and in-house that has corporate clients doing? What are the solutions that they are developing in light of all of these? This is just the sample, by far as not inclusive or completely inclusiveness. Many of them have legal project management departments. So the project management is a concept and a skill that has been around for decades often used in manufacturing. It's making its way into other industries, including in-law process improvement as well. Automated document assembly are referenced companies like LegalZoom, but there's certainly many others out there including some that focus their efforts on the corporate side of the real estate closing of businesses. An example, automated document assembly. Expert system tools that can give people the answers to commonly asked questions without the need for a human being that have taken care of that very bottom level easy to answer legal questions. Then you have AI, like I said, still an open question, but impact that's going to have. Managed legal services, legal process outsourcing. All of these new providers that are emerging and we can get into some interesting regulatory issues about whether they are delivering legal services or not, but whether they are or not, they're doing it. They are delivering all sorts of law-like services to very sophisticated corporate legal departments. Alternative fee arrangements as incentives for greater efficiency. By this I mean the largest companies in the world, Microsoft recently did this. They told their outside counsel on certain kinds of cases there are not going to allow their lawyers to bill by the hour anymore, period. And guess what happens when lawyers don't make more money when they spend more time on a legal matter? Suddenly innovation becomes a lot more important because they're not going to make money unless they deliver the services more efficiently. So as clients start to rise up and request and demand alternative fee arrangements, we are going to still see things the way that they have been. So AFAs, the ban for AFAs is an important development. Law firms and legal departments have for all intents and purposes are indeed departments. So a couple of major firms, Dentons is one, Syfarth is another, Davis-Wrights are made. These are all large firms that are developing new approaches inside their law firms. And then there are in-house legal teams that are doing the same, Liberty Mutual here in Boston is a good example of it. And then you gave mention of blockchain and there's an effort to standardize blockchain in the context of law, still early days as I mentioned before. Okay, responses by law schools. As I mentioned that Christopher Columbus laying down, image is a problematic one. What's doing in this regard? Well, we're starting to change. This group of law schools have efforts much like Suffolk has built to try to deliver to students a new mindset, a new way of thinking about how legal services could be delivered using technology and other innovations. And I'll just very briefly mention this institute that we have. We have a concentration which is kind of like a law school major. Many law schools have law school concentrations or majors and standard areas like intellectual property or international law or areas like that. We built one around legal technology and innovation where we're teaching our students about legal project management and process of human and automated documents, assembly and expert system tools. And they are getting some really remarkable employment of the sort that you see on the screen. And our challenge is actually finding enough students to build the demands. Convincing our students at this is a really powerful and impactful area to pursue. So we are having trouble meeting the demand that we're seeing in the marketplace. So I'll close with some pictures and think about just the ways in which so many other industries in our world have undergone change. You think about this company, those of you who are young in the room may not remember this, but in order to watch a movie that wasn't on TV, on a broadcast channel, we just have to go to a store and rent either a VHS tape or a DVD. Obviously times have changed and technology has come up with new solutions for that. Then we had shopping. Well, we still go to stores, right? But I very rarely go to one these days because there are technological solutions for that. Even taking pictures has undergone a remarkable transformation as a result of technology. And then people services, right? You might say, well, law isn't like those. It's not a, it's more of a people business and judgment. Well, taxicabs are a people service and that's been disrupted by technology, but you might resist still and say, well, that's not professional services. Professional services are a different animal. Like banking. Well, a lot of people have lost their jobs in banking due to technology, but you might say still no, no, no. Let's kind of talk about real professions like accounting. Well, I don't know about you. How do you do your banking, your accounting and taxes? I do mine online. And so that has disrupted a major profession. And the ultimate question I think that we face in legal education and legal profession is what is the next picture that I am going to put up there after this one? What is the analogous slide that I put up? That is a question I think that you are all gonna be dealing with in this course. Future law is about the answer to that question about what comes next. It's an exciting time to be in the delivery of legal services. Innovation is starting to take place all around us and those people who are thinking about it and on the cutting edge have an enormous opportunity. And so it's an exciting time. So I applaud all of you for trying to tackle these issues in this course and I'd be happy to answer questions that people might have. All people are, all people get their hands up and ask away. And I'm glad to ask the brain for today. So one of the challenges is the question of regulation of what the tool is entitled to give legal advice. And if one of the entrepreneurial theorists in this room says I want to build a tool that doesn't act, that applies cases or does real estate closing down. Is there a risk of them running a foul? So we'll comment on sort of the line of what amounts to providing legal services and how smart technology can think about that line. This is one of the biggest regulatory challenges in this area, defining what is the practice of law. So nearly every state in the country has restrictions and prohibitions against what's called the unauthorized practice of law. People who are not lawyers are practicing law for all intents and purposes. So the question comes up, what is the practice of law for purposes of these laws? And the answer not only varies from state to state, but even within a particular state is incredibly vague to the point where courts have actually come out and said able to define what the practice of law is. Now think about the ridiculousness of judges who are themselves lawyers being unable to define what it is that they do. But that is the problem of the unauthorized practice of law and to be quite frank, many times unauthorized practice of law provisions have been used not to protect the public, which is the basic reason that these exist, but to protect the legal profession itself on competition, which is the worst possible reason to have a law. And so this is a long way of saying it's a relatively unsettled area of law, and as a result, people take to innovation companies, especially when they are consumer facing as opposed to delivering services to corporate clients, regulators can not to care about that so much, but when they are delivering services directly to consumers is when the issue tends to come up. So legal Zoom has been the subject of lawsuits in several different states. So far they have survived all of them, sometimes with having to tailor some changes to what they do in particular states, but for the most part they have survived those challenges, but it's a real significant risk for innovators in the United States who want to go in and try to do something different that they could run off against this particular challenge depending on what segment of the industry that they're looking at and the ways in which they deliver services. So long answer to your question, but the answer is very unclear and unfortunate. That's a problem. Yes. So where do you think that the point that's so much consistent? Not from the idea that I've read the report which tells me perfectly, why is that so much consistent? Oh boy, that is a very insightful question. And it goes in many ways. And if you can. Yeah. Sure. So the question is, so I would say, if I may, to rephrase it slightly, two different parts to your question. To what extent are the restrictions on lawyers' ability to partner with others, other professionals inhibiting innovation? And then why is there so much resistance to allowing lawyers to engage in different kind of ownership structures within their walk rooms? So on the question about, is it inhibiting innovation? There, the available evidence which a few years ago was hard to come by. There's more evidence that is emerging from other countries. Before I answer fully, I should take a step back because we might be operating more dollars than there is in the room. But let me take one step back. In the United States, unlike some countries, lawyers are not permitted to partner with and share fees with people who are not lawyers. So if I develop a law firm, ABC law firm, I cannot partner with an accounting firm or a consulting firm. It's not permitted. I can't share fees with them. I can't take an equity investor in my walk room and share the profits that are generated with the equity investor if that investor is not a lawyer. It's not permissible. It's prohibited under the rules of professional conduct. The rule 5.4 is the prohibition. Other countries have liberalized this area and are allowing lawyers to partner with other kinds of professionals. And there is some evidence that that is bringing about some innovation that might be a way to drive more innovation and the delivery of legal services is if you free up that restriction and allow it. Now, though your question you asked, why is there so much restriction in the United States to liberalizing this rule and allowing what is now permissible in places like the UK and Australia? The answer is, I give you the, there's a cynical answer to your question and then there is what people are saying. What people are saying is that if you allow lawyers and law firms to partner with other professionals and give them equity stakes in law practices, that it would jeopardize the professional independence of the legal services that are being delivered that law firms would all for all intents and purposes become businesses and not care about their clients, ultimate public that we are supposed to serve. That's the argument. Now I see you're sparking perhaps appropriately so because after all law firms and law practices, you are businesses and lawyers have to navigate those issues and should exercise professional independence, whether they have an equity investor or not, if you think about lawyers who work inside of corporations and who are general counsel of corporations, they have a single client, they are inside of a company and yet we trust them to do the right thing, that exercise professional independence despite the fact that they're salary, perhaps they're stock, options are all tied to that company. We trust them to be professionally independent and to do the right thing but for some reason we don't allow that of law firms. So that's a long way of saying that I put my own personal view is that the restrictions in this area are too significant and that we need liberalization of rule 5.4. The professional arguments that have been made against that liberalization, I don't think hold up under careful scrutiny and the cynical answer to the question is it's really about protectionism and the concern that others will take over various kinds of law practices and that the profits to be made for the lawyers will suffer as a result. I think that is the concern that underlies many of the arguments that you see out there. That's just a personal opinion but that's what I think is going on. So I just have one very quick follow up about that. It's so surprising out in this room taking advantage of the fact that there are probably, so how many of the services done we've even had part-images in DC and there are a couple of other jurisdictions in the States that certain part-images in the US will pay. I mean, that's about to happen, right? Yes, you've taken this to like the advanced level discussion of the regulation of legal service. I love it. And before I became dean, I got calls of that sort about how do we navigate those regulatory issues. The Washington, so there are some jurisdictions in the US that have more liberalized approaches to this issue mentioned Washington DC. The problem is if you're gonna build some kind of enterprise to scale or jurisdiction, you're ultimately gonna have to operate other jurisdictions. Just because you've created yourself in DC, it doesn't mean you'll walk on top of problems elsewhere which is why the fact that DC has a more liberalized rule hasn't led to an emergence of companies creating themselves in DC and then serve the rest of the country. Hasn't happened. So that's not the answer. And creating yourself in the UK or Australia it doesn't get you into the US because once you start going into the US to build the services for reasons of our cultural sub law principles, you would be subject to the laws of the United States and the jurisdiction which we're delivering the services. So that is not a solution either. The best workarounds tend to be either focusing on the corporate end and the reason that it's useful to focus on the corporate end is if there is a general counsel who's ultimately responsible for the services that you are delivering to a company, you have a lawyer who's overseeing it and you might argue either if it is a legal services it's under the direction of the lawyer or that it's not really the practice of law that there is this distinction between the delivery of legal services and the practice of law. So for the moment, corporate innovations in corporate legal services have not been challenged the same way that the delivery of consumer legal services. Again, this could be a much longer conversation but there are various companies that already exist. They're trying to get around this issue. I mean, legal zoom is an example, right? They're not a law firm. And if they were actually for practicing law what they would be doing would be impermissible in just about every US jurisdiction. So the way they've navigated is to very carefully craft their services in a way so that it does not count as the practice of law. So again, long answer to a short question but a conversation that couldn't take us much more than. Yes, great question. So when we're talking about a company like legal zoom if they are the subject of a challenge in a particular state on the grounds that they are engaged in the unauthorized practice of law you're asking is that civil or criminal? It depends on the jurisdiction. By the way, you may start to get the hang of this that a law professor's favorite answer is it depends. And once again, it really does depend. So some states view the unauthorized practice of law as a civil violation, some view it as criminal. So it could be either one. And who brings it also varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Sometimes there are committees, adjuncts to the courts that do it. Sometimes not. So it really does vary a lot from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. So this line of inquiry can be generalized in some sense, one thing we realize here is the future is not evenly distributed, plan of why. So this idea of seeking out microcosms where things are being pushed ahead of the rest of the plan for jurisdictions can you generalize on this particular conversation around the structure of law for instance and who can practice law? And say what parts of the plan, what predictive microcosms or what exploratory jurisdictions are the most friendly to try on your ideas. With the thinking being that when prototype there, those who are doing it there are in the best position to expand these ideas elsewhere rapidly given that things are increasingly digital, that what was a jurisdiction is now increasingly cloudable and it's the same blurring line very quickly. So I would say in terms of legal innovation for the reasons that we were talking about in terms of the regulatory landscape, currently places like the UK and Australia are the most friendly in terms of legal innovations. For certain kinds of legal innovations those would be the most friendly places. Especially if you're actually going out there and practicing law in a new way those would be the places where it would be. If you're a legal zoom of the world it's a little bit harder to say because who is gonna go after you by the unauthorized practice of law and really depend on who chairs a particular committee and who's in charge of the unauthorized practice of law and state that one's a little bit tougher to square. With the proviso that there is at least one US jurisdiction that allows lawyers to partner with others in that being the district of the department. And I'm wondering, what are you seeing cloudable or what are you seeing? Let me make sure I understand your question. So other kinds of legal professionals who are now being involved in the delivery of legal services for that year? It's always like, are you showing up in a way that you're creating some sort of you're showing up in your phone group like for how it's going to go about it? That are analogous where the... Well it's not the mode of the matter, it's the ability or... Yeah, alternative structures. So I think those have existed, you know there's alternative dispute resolution that is taking place outside of the courts and there are all kinds of regulatory structures that people buy into as a result. I'm not sure, you know, they may have it that way. Yeah, if you don't mind me trying. So there's a whole alternative legal system in the United States involving arbitration. And in consumer products, people can opt in to arbitration and opt in and really in quotes. Sometimes you can't do your product without opting in. And at that point you can fund a subject even though people were deemed that you've agreed to buy contact. And the things that you are subjected to are things that would never be passable in the court of law. And there's been a great court that I gave in the last few years that said that these are important. In almost every imaginable case, including things like elderly people checking for nursing moment and waiting line that there'd be no practice in somebody getting a lot to get injured. They say those elderly people don't want their sound mind to opt in to arbitration. So I'm sorry to step on that. Arbitration is the best example of that. But probably trying to be independent is basically as long as it doesn't violate your constitutional rights, you're stuck without a system of court order. Regarding the general accessibility of legal services, do you see those fences that mean something that more than should be built in the bottom of the journey on the last capital of respect? Or would this be, let's say, weaponized in going to the college to create fair responses? Yeah, the standard models of disruption suggests that it happens at the bottom and it works its way out. And to some extent that has been true, although right now we are seeing disruption really throughout the industry, including the high-end services. So I would say right now I'm seeing it at all points along the spectrum from high-end down to the consumer end and everywhere in between. I'm not sure if one is necessarily ahead of the other. I'm curious to hear if Gabe has a different perception. No, I don't. But there's an incredible amount of money that's starting to flow into the high-end which might affect the trickle down. So one example is major international law called Den. Now it hasn't gone incubator, which they call next law by habit. And they're using that to finance legal tech companies. So one gentleman's question was why can't lawyers partner with non-lawyers in a law firm? They can, but lawyers can't invest in vehicles that are not law firms and effectively own a legal tech company. So Den's next law lab is an example of a company law firm that's spending $10 million in legal disruptive enterprises that are, and there's a dozen of them, so you can go on the website, techlawlab.com. And some of those companies are going to change taking a very gotten dollar. Usually others seek to serve very poor people and provide just that bit of legal term. At my level, I'm wondering how the policy technology impacts the rule of law. When I went to law school, the whole country for the rule of law was a pretty similar situation, similarly, in the case of greater fairness and quality. Don't necessarily see that happen. Are you bidding for the rule of law? Yeah, I think it will be a very positive one. I think the rule of law depends on people getting access to the basic legal services that they need. And right now, all of the evidence suggests that they're not in the United States, very simplistic show, and sure to tell them, 80% of the legal needs before are going to run back. And so it seems to me that technology, appropriately applied, can help drive down that percentage. And if you do that, then I think people are great to give them more access to the essential legal services that they need. There's a core part of what we mean when we say the rule of law, that law is actually accessible to people, that they can get the basic legal services that they need in a particular situation. So I view technology innovation as a critical component of the rule of law itself that I think is under threat in the way that we are delivering the services today. You have a different view on this. Can you enable the private situation? Not really, but 40% of it. Oh, I see. So if you're thinking about Modria as an example, right, ODR, it's taking it outside of the court system, but what's interesting, and I know you know this, courts are now using those same kinds of solutions so that we now have court annexed online dispute resolution tools. So an increasing number of courts are taking the technology that was developed in the private sector, bringing in the public sector. So I don't think the fact that it's a merchant of the private sector necessarily means that it will remain there. It can be used in the public sector as well in a way that I think ultimately advances. The ODR can be used. So we'll hear in a moment, I'm confused about the project and hands-on aspect of this course, but one of the best things at MIT I think are legal hackathons. And credit birds do. Suffolk Law was the first law school to do a proper, awesome legal hackathon anywhere around here. And I wanted to follow up on, I want to say the best legal hackathon project idea I've ever heard in any country that you brought to MIT years ago now and just ask you, if you remember it right, or I can just outline it for you. I think I do remember it. I just want to, you know, it was premature then. It is not premature now. Any of these students could do it as a project. And I just, even if no one does, I'd like to activate and spark people's creative thinking about what is possible in the intelligent introduction of tech to law. Can you say it? Well, you say the project. Yeah, so in my recollection of it, I think you give it more credit than it deserves this particular idea. But what I struggled with is legislative drafting and the idea that rules and laws that are draftive ultimately have all sorts of ambiguities that people didn't anticipate when they drafted the words. And that you could crowdsource draft language and ask people what they think it means in a variety of circumstances that might be commonly encountered and uncover the extent to which language has ambiguities that the drafters did not anticipate. And that you could have an iterative process using technology that would allow people, drafters of either regulations or administrative agencies or legislatures to go back and rewrite basic legal terms in order to ensure that they had the meaning that was intended. I think that was the idea. That was the idea. I'm somewhat less optimistic about its potential, but I'm glad you thought it was so wonderful. I do. And so just consider this. If you guys want to try a crowdsourcing, we've got a lot of tools just laying around the media a lot today that could be configured to do it and he just said, but Dean Perlman just said. And he's done it. Thanks. He used to be an idiot. Then do it. Now I'll sign up with anyone that wants to hack it. You will learn a great deal about the nature of the law, what the issues are, and what it would take to begin to systematize it such that it could be productized as a reliable, quality, controllable service with predictable legal outcomes. And that's what your hack would enable with statistical probability certainty. Well inside, I think ISO 9000 standards the way you hooked it up. I mean, the other way you could use it is not just in the public setting legislative bills or rules, but you could also use it in the private sector for a contract language, just as an example. There's all sorts of language and transactional documents that the language is not always clear. So you could use a tool like this to try to figure out how people would perceive this language and what it might mean. Is that language ever litigated and went to a jury for some kind of resolution? It might be useful. There you go. Yes? I was just going to ask you a good question. So I'm just making sense of the words that would be used in your legal documents or other kinds. Yeah. So I'm actually gonna turn to Gabe. I bet he has a better answer than what I would give on this one. Well, I keep legal writing on other things. So the answer is that there are various software packages that people use to make sure there's a language that they're applying to the contractor. The challenge is that law is a profession that's sometimes invaluable. So one of the first language that law can learn is that when they read a case that's been written as a precedent to apply, there's some kind of a reason that they've got or a binder back, do something that they don't explicitly state here that the sentimentally that made it. So there have been efforts made to sort of close the gap for me for the mailbook. There's a movement called the simplified law movement. There's been a movement within something that always lost in the legal citation. The book of a blue book that's been hoping to be written to be approachable and that the citation was going to follow on. But there's some aspect of law where people that hate this and think, well, it's interesting. So in PAC IDEA, which I agree is horrific and I just love it, I'm going to include it, one of the pieces of pushback to that, this pool that would make all legislation 100% clear is you're going to find legislators who'd be like, oh, wait, I don't want to get 100% clear. This became a political cover, not to do with that, and maybe they would say that without me putting the thing in. So there is a tension there. We, how will we be 100% critical leader and can we provide ourselves cover? And you're a tool available, but you're a reason. Yeah, I gave last point about intentional and important ones that have been involved in drafting rules and words like reasonable are often used as a way to try to get a basic concept out, but we all know that what's considered reasonable has been a very good thing on this interpreting. Sometimes it's the best answer that you know. But a tool like the one I was describing might still be useful because if you insert the word reasonable, you could get feedback on how people perceive what's reasonable in that particular sentence. So that might be useful feedback in and of itself, even though we recognize the word you're using is ambiguous, how that ambiguous word would be applied in those situations might be some value. I'll start with that very quickly, also out of spin to that, which I think makes it more engineerable and a better project for MIT and our collaborator students to attack them. So when I was doing legislation, I cut my teeth on deliberate ambiguities. Sometimes the only way for certain things, you agree, you don't agree, and you have to pledge it and then you get the legislation done. So one of the questions we frequently had, especially in the Commerce Committee with early commerce stuff and other things where we didn't know about taxes yet, we didn't know about other things is whether our ambiguous language was correctly ambiguous so that we didn't accidentally define things we didn't feel like or make other problems we didn't want to do. Crowdsourcing, having crowdsourced the ability to ask people, is this language, do you think this language, in legislation A, would cause a taxable event? B, would not cause a taxable event? Or C, would in no way addresses whether this is a taxable event? If everybody, according to our threshold conference said, we think it doesn't address it, we feel like, okay, sweet. Keep that in there for the next markup. If some people thought they did address which we frequently find out later, then that was bad or we killed the bill. I think your tool is good irrespective of the goals of the law so we can begin to adjust goals and outcomes to the legal language which previously had no point of contact. Imagine, for example, that you're a lobbyist in a particular industry and you're advocating for, or might think about advocating for a particular language in the bill. You might get a collection of alternate decision makers, decision makers may be former judges, to sit in the room and you go, you know, or a universe of them out in the cloud and ask them to respond to different versions of the language and based on what you receive, then could lobby in favor of a particular language in light of the expert opinion that you're getting. Go. Just to add to that, people have words and words, they are very much significant and they're all zeroes and one and they're all on the same level. So we have mobility in the world but all these words and research and finding the unique context with the sentiment views, what do they really mean, you know, they need to work in all men, who can wrote something like that. We have a more take on the research and the consensus on that. Never before, it seems like a great setting point for that. Okay. I mean, it's not terrible, I think. Best legal hack I've ever heard. Okay. One more question. Yep. Go ahead. Your presentation, I think, made a very favorable picture of the trend. I wonder what your top concerns are, though, as the legal field adopts technology and such. So I've heard a number of concerns raised. One is a concern that the best legal services are still the kind that a lawyer could deliver in the bespoke fashion. And that we might lose out on that very important work that's being done, particularly efforts to change the law in valuable, socially valuable ways. That if we have fewer lawyers who are able to undertake the bespoke work, that it ultimately could undermine the advancement of law itself. That if all you do is automate and systematize the delivery of legal services, we lose out on that very important aspect of what the legal profession has always pursued, which is advancing law in socially useful ways. That's one of the arguments that I've heard. I don't think the two are mutually exclusive myself. I think we can do all of this automation and there will still be work for lawyers. One of the big questions out there, well, what is the future of lawyers? I still think there's gonna be plenty of work to be done, but the work that lawyers do is going to be the stuff that has to remain bespoke in some ways, where the expression that I've always loved is that lawyers will be practicing at the top of their licenses. They won't be doing the more routine work. They could focus on that more socially valuable, very difficult work that cannot be automated or at least can't be automated yet. You know, let us, very similar, going through a very similar process. Yep. I'm just wondering, as far as information security over the world, these are not a concern. I mean, it's a combination of problems. To what extent is that a reality of concern is a huge concern? But it's a concern not because of all of the new ways of delivering legal services. It's actually standard law firms that are encountering the cybersecurity problems. And hackers are targeting the law firms that represent the biggest companies in the world, because oftentimes the law firms are the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain for these very sophisticated companies. And so the hackers are trying to get access to the information at that point. I don't think the automation of legal services really adds to the problem beyond what already exists. So I think cybersecurity is a problem in every industry, in every forum, throughout legal. I'm not sure that there are any new problems that are created, except perhaps the possibility that private company, which is not a bound by the duty of confidentiality, could use that information, sell that information in ways that a law firm would be ethically prohibited from doing. So it's not a cybersecurity problem. It might be a regulatory problem that I think could be addressed, but that's, it's not a cybersecurity issue per se. It's more of a regulatory. Before we let the following go, I'd like to ask a couple of favors. One, where can students in this class say, find one social media or figure out where you're talking and what you're out doing. Two, you have been prepped with it. Is there an ask you have of them, something for them to read about, watch, think about, so that they can get you to learn to do this thing? How did the shock attend to you? So in terms of reaching out to me, just Andrew Parlman, Suffolk, Google, I feel fine by website, email address, social media. So that's pretty easy. In terms of my ask of all of you, I'd love to hear what you come up with. I want to know what projects you developed as a result of this course. I'm very eager to hear it. I'm sure you have ideas that are at least as good as the one that does, I think it's so wonderful. And I want to know what they are. So please share them with me, that's my ask. Okay, well, and Andrew, you are going to be with us on October 31st, the second day of the conference. So one thing we can do, subject to how yours works, of the projects is, those of you that choose to do projects and present them at the end of the class, we can make space on the agenda for our big conference where projects from the class can be presented for feedback. And while you're there, and to make sure the opportunity is actually here, the students give the project pitches. So hopefully there will be room in there somewhere in the schedule to find the right calibration where everyone can do that. Since it'll be right back in this building across the hall. Excellent. Well, thank you for having me. I love the course. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, while I do hope we can share the things that come up in the class with the Dean, I hope it's a two-way street that he's perhaps in one of the best positions to offer tips and suggestions. I'll add future hackathon ideas. Listen, I want to just give you a little bit of context for the class. And in particular for those of you who are excited to do the outside of the classroom part, which is to say the exploratory projects. And also want to get you all to know each other. This is shortly, it's actually at the bottom of the class webpage, which we'll revisit in a minute. This class is only one of a handful of future explorations that we've done here at the Media Lab that are thinking about the inventions that are changing how we live in the future. And then applying them to these market super sectors, the way we as millions of people planet-wide are engaging with problems. One example is around reimagining how we source products and materials in a sustainable fashion. Two other examples about how we reimagined financial services in technology and how we deal with all things human health. And then we've also drawn lessons from the world of science fiction. These four example of future classes are the precursors to what you're now experiencing in this half semester offer. And I also want to spotlight that over the course of 150 years, this institution within Boston has graduated people who started thousands of companies like these. And I want to call your attention not to the specifics, but rather realizing that entire industries have been rebooted because of the enabling technologies. And this one in particular I want to spotlight. Because today many people know about business process outsourced and things like Infosys, companies of that sort that have taken things that were done locally and removed the constraint of geography. Patney did his business studies here and founded what became the very first of the international outsourced businesses. Completely disrupted the sector. The Infosys people were former patty folks. And he started it here in Kendall Square and in Bombay, Mumbai. What's the legal version of that? Because this is the kind of scale of disruption we're talking about now. It's not just these alums that are historically amazing. These are things that were born in places like this classroom. These are student ventures. And I want to just point out that there's hundreds that are collectively worth tens of billions of dollars today in public markets. But I want to spotlight one in particular. This direct hit venture. Direct hit is just one case example of a company idea born from an exercise much like this. Gary Cullis was up the river at Harvard Law School. It'd been a patent clerk in DC frustrated with the lousy nature of search. Is it surely we can do better? And this is how before Google he realized. This is an early instance of the idea of search applied to a specific sub-sector. But the fact of that original problem inspired the creation of direct hit, which later solved for half a billion of ass Gs. Now the power behind ask.com. There are other examples from sister versions of this class. From reimagining how the prior engine, the reimagination, by creating life coaches. Not just wills, but other domains. Legal and advisory practice. With the notion of a legal guidance chatbot, bringing simple AI to bear on the kinds of things that we all need to deal with. The world of AI is changing how people will need to deal with the realities, the consequences of, for example, AI robotic accidents. Who's live? These are all open questions that people in past classes have touched on. This is what we'd like you to do here. Just yesterday, this case example of the Equifax failure provoked this notion, why don't we do a SUBOT? Why not enable many, many people who are not affected by this to have a reaction? What's your version of that? Well, in this class, we're going to be here in the room listening to people who are in the thick of doing it. People whose ventures are actually in the process of building some sort of a law-oriented new solution. We ask you all to do a project that explores the domain you care about. And then there's a pile of things that are beyond the hour and a half every week in the next five weeks. We want you to take one of three flavors that deliverable. The first flavor is the canonical one around here. Just think of a new startup idea. Or think of how an established company ought to create a new practice area business unit. Second is try mocking up or prototyping something. And third is say, let's step back and assess the big picture of an area. Now, you could pick any or some combination of these. Many of the questions that you asked the dean have implicit in them, exploratory roadmap domains, reimagining how ownership of fugitive law service companies could be done. Thinking about alternative jurisdiction, and so forth. Flip around those questions. Turn them into project concepts. Those will play out over the course of the semester. You want to hear your best ideas in the upcoming week or two, or at least see them. We'll share them online. Ideally, you band together and you do this not alone, but with others. Ideally, those with complementary skills or at least shared interests. We want you to iterate. This is a really short half semester. We're talking about a handful of sessions. So this is not going to be some final end product that you're going to be raising a pile of money on right away. Now, what this is is first draft. But because we're very practical here, we want the format of whatever you do to be immediately useful beyond the class. For instance, it could be in the format of one of MIT's competitions, or one of the competitions in the Boston Metro era, I think, mass challenge. So if your draft of what you do in the class is already immediately relevant to something beyond the class, you get two for one. For some of you, you're not going to do a venture plan, but you're going to do something that we aspire for you to publish because why not reputation build and have some practical consequence that's not merely a grade in the class? We want you to have it be relevant immediately. So this plays out very quickly over the next month and a half. All this stuff, including these slides and what you saw earlier from Dean, will be online on the Stellar site. Let me just point out that this is the four MIT page that we point everything to. Everybody should have access to it. It's currently spelled out as open to all. We ask you to go to the bottom and fill in this Google survey that says, OK, who are you? Here it is. That'll all be summed up on a sheet that you all can see. So don't put anything super confidential in there, although it's not intended to be spread beyond the class. And then on the Stellar website, the materials is where all these things are, everything from working syllabus, the calendar coming over the next few weeks, and all the materials you're going to need. Finally, this proved to be the simplest way to get the maximum number of people to easily opt in to a non-confidential space for sharing latest stories, latest articles, latest concepts that don't be sharing your very best confidential idea. That's for internal class stuff. But this Facebook page could be a nice place to just throw out lots of examples of recent news stories. So this is a really good, fast way to parallelize and share lots of things that we all may care about. So please add yourself to this, that, and we will approve. All right, finally, a minute, let me spotlight Facebook page. Everybody can do well in this. This is not intended to be a curve. And all the projects should be just provocatively interesting. So let's revisit some of that. What are the projects? Look, each one of these, we want you to float in some way in the upcoming week or two. And we suggest this IdeaPitch schema that just gives the high concept on one slide, just because it's the easiest way to rapidly get everybody to see everybody else's thinking. But we have to hurry up, because we only have a month and change to do anything. So here's the template. This tends to be structured for a new venture idea. So it's framed around the here's a problem we're solving. Here's why I think we'll solve it. But there's also room for uncertainty. Here's an open question that we don't yet know about. But this is essentially the format of a business plan executive summary. This is the essential format that essentially all of the competitions or places for getting early grant financing. There's hundreds of thousands of USD available for grant that's free money, gift money, for prototyping of new ideas. But you have to organize yourself enough to make a compelling case to get out the money. That's what we want you to think about this class is for. Now what kind of ideas? This is what I want to conclude with, because there are thousands, hundreds, even, of domains of change that are relevant for this class. So we hope that you will either step back and do some kind of roadmap, or hone in and do some sort of mock-up or over-protify, or think, what's the new venture, the alternative way of structuring delivery of these services? And there's so many. I just use some as provocative examples. But the questions you heard earlier are indeed basically slight variations on proto-idea pitches. We also want you to engage with us, whether by email or chat or whatever. Float your proto-ideas. Don't be, feel free to be embarrassed in the class, because we don't care. The idea is that you propose one thing, other people propose others, you may mash together, you may end up dropping your idea, you may end up recombining to the third idea. But it's everything from just rethinking, what is AI, and all of the tools for auto-magic interaction mean for the provisioning of legal services? It could be taking legal property domains or jurisdictions and saying, what do they enable that people haven't really pushed the extremes on? Law of the sea is a good example. I like it, why? Because the ship has amazing legal status. But are there any limits to the schedule of ship? Could we have multiple cubic kilometers ships? This is really pushing the historical traditional definitions, but in a way that's now technologically possible. That's the kind of stuff we want. There's now a space initiative at the Media Lab. What about law of space? Who owns what, where? Are there new things that are increasingly gonna be important as we have multiple private organizations that are in space increasingly heavy-lift? Huge, interesting new domain or relatively, assessively soon-to-be-available domain. What about this jurisdictional arbitrage idea? Are there, in fact, places where it's better to be doing your business? It's better to try things out first. It's better to be an early adopter in some place. Why is it that we have things like incorporation to Delaware or ship registries in Panama or Liberia? Are there other things of that sort that are plausible in the future? Where are the new rights domains? Are we having them in touch now? This lab's fastest-changing stuff is not about the classic world of code, or even the world of things, the making, but instead the world of biology. The newest professors here are interested in DNA as a substrate for data storage, for computation, for editing organisms, hacking us. Okay, whose rights are aware? In this whole landscape. This is similarly the world of artificial intelligence. We laugh about it, but do robots and artificial entities have any kind of rights? Are there constraints on them? What are those emergent domains? Yeah, the list goes on. This little nugget at the end, the idea of doing a natural language processing on not just a ruling, but maybe an entire corpus of historical rulings, maybe comparative, linguistic analysis between different jurisdictions. Maybe it's across the 50 U.S. states. Maybe it's internationally, maybe in the Commonwealth Anglophone States, or in other jurisdictions, all this stuff. And more. The world of these new technologies, like blockchain, applied to reimagining contracts or asset registries. All the huge stuff, we get the digital currency initiative here, cares about these things. All territory that is a potential super theme for one month intensive outside of class, outside of the classroom project affiliated with future law. And this is your excuse, your all-purpose excuse to talk to whoever you need to because you're doing an academic exercise on these questions, and to explore these questions and just stitch it together into a format that matters to you. You're after the paper, that could be an innovation roadmap. A prototype that gives people a taste of what the future tool or service that looked like, that's second case option. And then third case options, what's the new startup that you start your planning on or you at least make progress on a plan towards here in the next month and change? Okay. That's the project side outside class. Question. So I have a project I'm gonna propose for sure, but I also have a bunch of ideas that I just wanna propose that I move as well. That's all fair game. Okay, I wanna make sure I can do that. Absolutely. And people, clearly there's more ideas than there is time or capacity to pursue. So people have multiple ideas, it's best to put them out there and get other people to, in some sense, crowd-rank, right? Sometimes your second idea is actually the crowds and vigor idea, and you get motivated to do that. Why not? Look, we're here for a half semester. This is a completely exploratory realm. Use this as an excuse to do what you think is most intriguing and also to sort of go deep on something, but also to flow widely, but range of things you find in the future. That's also sort of noting sort of a vote for the next semester. Other questions about this stuff? Game and accounts on this? No, no, no, correct me. Yes. People can start finishing as early as next week and we'll see a little bit about the times. We wanna pack a lot into the classroom. So we may end up, over the course of the next two weeks, be floating your ideas. Those with ideas, get them in now. But we may end up sharing the bulk to the class by the stellar side. We'll see how much time we actually have in the room. Just, we have a guest speaker here. We're gonna talk about their stuff with priority. Yeah? Okay, that was, what was that? Daza? Yes, I guess the important thing is, I know a lot of you have said that you can't be here for every class, but you'd like to participate. And.