Behavioural economics

The psychology of legal relations

Index — Click ᐅ to expand: Psychology

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

STEVIE: (at the suggestion of golf) I’ll get the “Back in 15 minutes” sign.
JOHNNY: Oh, it’ll take more than 15 minutes. STEVIE: You have to give people hope.

—Schitt’s Creek

Landing page for BE ideas. Ask nicely.

Diversity

Benefits of

Encourages dissent and defuses groupthink
Encourage healthy conflict, not unhealthy peace

(see meetings)

Discourages jargon, which is a shortcut to ways of thinking which can conceal embedded flaws. If you have to “spell out” accepted ideas without seeing them in their fancy buzzwords, it is easier to see the flaws.

Ways of encouraging

Don’t make it compulsory - that is counterproductive
Encourage mentoring

Design

If people/clients/staff are continually misusing/misunderstanding a process or product, that means your product design is wrong. CF Charles Perrow: almost no catastrophic accident, at its root cause, boils down to operator error. But almost every one is blamed on operator error.

Lean manufacture

Are there wastes in our process
Seven wastes of negotiation

Great dogmas

Data will make us redundant

Signal to noise ratio?
Derivatives

Integrity of process is paramount: If the process is perfect, there is no risk
We have banished risk; and that risk is bad

Risk is inevitable
Risk is desirable: it is a condition precedent to return.
Understand and manage risks; don’t try to banish them.

This time it is different

Machines versus humans

Have we got the division of labour right?
Machine - Digital

Replicable, cheap, free, value -> zero.
Ultimate fidelity
Fast
Algorithmic: will work. Needs no supervision
Rules
Deterministic
Literal
Data-dependent

Human

Analog
Error-prone
Heuristic: might work: Needs supervision
Slow
Ambiguous
Metaphorical
Evaluation

Triage versus redundancy

You can strip a deterministic process out of a messy human one
You can't force the genuinely intractable analog to the digital

The role of ritual in legal practice and how that can stop common sense