In The End of Lawyers and Tomorrow’s Lawyers, Richard Susskind paints a picture of the future of the legal profession. In Susskind’s analysis, information technology innovation plays a pivotal role in the design of new legal services and creating demand for new legal professionals. The face of legal services is already changing - legal start-ups focusing on legal analytics are an example.
Some law professors have indeed started their own firms offering legal analytics services. One US example is LexPredict, a start-up by Prof Daniel Katz and Michael Bommarito (also the current CEO of LexPredict). In Canada, Prof Benjamin Alarie co-founded Blue J Legal.
Review these two examples and search for at least three other firms or companies that provide legal analytics services. Concisely describe what services they render and present your findings to the class. This exercise will give you a good idea of existing use cases to which you can apply the learning outcomes of this course in your future careers.
For each of these, find answers to the following questions:
- What do they do? For whom? What field of law?
- Where are they from?
- What techniques do they use? AI? A specific type of AI? Something else?
- What evidence do they provide that their service works?
- What does it costs?
- Anything else?
Many jurisdictions make judicial information and the text of judgments by their courts publicly available as open data. For example, legal information from the EU is available on eur-lex.europa.eu. The European Court of Human Rights publishes its judgments through the HUDOC database on hudoc.echr.coe.int.
The French courts publish on legifrance.gouv.fr or you can search judgments by the Conseil D’Etat on Ariane Web at conseil-etat.fr/en/judging. However, a French law (Article 33 of the Justice Reform Act) enacted in June 2019 forbids using this data for many analytical purposes. You can read about this situation in the Artificial Lawyer here and here. The French National Bar Council has issued a statement that you can read here.
Think about the arguments in favour of and against the French law. Think about the arguments in a broader context and consider how they apply to legislative and regulatory data, (parliamentary) voting data, data about the legal professions, etc.
During class, we will hold a debate on analytics of legal data and divide the class in three groups:
- A group that will argue in favour of allowing analytics of legal data;
- A group that will argue against allowing analytics of legal data; and
- A group that will act as panel and makes a reasoned judgment on the desirability of legal analytics.