A new ebook edited by Stanford Regulation School’s David Freeman Engstrom, the LSVF Professor in Legislation and co-director of the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Authorized Occupation, can take a deep dive into technological developments in the authorized system, from digital legal proceedings to AI-fueled litigation equipment. In Legal Tech and the Potential of Civil Justice, Engstrom and his 28 co-contributors, like 6 SLS school associates, dissect the authorized and policy implications of the technologies that are poised to remake the civil justice program.
Preventing ultra-futuristic prognostications around “robo-judges” or “robo-legal professionals,” the e-book instead focuses on what is by now here or coming about the corner. As Engstrom notes in his introduction, the guide seeks to enrich, and also reorient, the discussion about legal technology’s implications for the civil justice system “by offering a grounded, concrete, empirically minded dialogue of the present-day point out of lawful tech and what, really, lies ahead.”
In this Q&A, Engstrom discusses some of the arguments and assertions in Lawful Tech and the Foreseeable future of Civil Justice, which grew out of a 2021 SLS conference of the very same title. The e book, published by Cambridge University Push, is offered for free download by way of Open Access on Cambridge Core.
In addition to Engstrom, the SLS contributors to the book are: Nora Freeman Engstrom, the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Regulation and co-director of the Rhode Center Margaret Hagan, government director of the Stanford Lawful Layout Lab Julian Nyarko, associate professor of law Norm Spaulding, the Nelson Bowman Sweitzer and Marie B. Sweitzer Professor of Legislation Todd Venook, a fellow at the Rhode Heart and Diego Zambrano, associate professor of regulation.
Can you illuminate some explanations why the development of lawful technologies has seemingly accelerated so immediately in recent a long time?
In the legal program, as in so quite a few other features of our globe, the COVID-19 pandemic was a impressive accelerant of specified traits by now in movement. Pre-COVID, Zoom proceedings were a rarity for most attorneys, but also plainly building their way into the system—via, say, remote depositions. As a end result of the pandemic, on-line proceedings are exploding, evolving, and acquiring their place in a wide variety of courts. An crucial example is on-line dispute resolution (ODR) platforms. These are not stay lawful proceedings, but on the internet platforms the place disputants can gather, usually asynchronously, and deal their way to settlement. ODR is now carried out or piloted in at minimum 200 condition and community court jurisdictions, with far more to come.
Yet another purpose is continuing technological innovations, especially Natural Language Processing (NLP), the branch of device understanding that performs textual content analytics and so retains the most assure in a legal procedure that trades in phrases. NLP has witnessed some drastic enhancements in recent decades—ChatGPT is only 1 the latest and very seen development—and Julian Nyarko’s chapter, co-authored with Washington University’s Jens Frankenreiter,