LegalHub: theory: Difference between revisions

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[[File:Hub.jpg|thumb|center|450px|[[CeleryHub]], as we shall call it, yesterday]]}}

The reg tech proposition: automation, network, disintermediation is obvious. So why doesn’t it work, and what can we do about it?

First, the manifest failings of [[reg tech]] as we see them present in different ways but boil down to the same thing: ''[[rent-seeking]]''.  

 

Because the provider’s primary interest is its annuity, ''[[iatrogenics|the cure tends, in practice, to be worse than the disease]]''. Furthermore, the [[proprietary]] nature of conventional [[reg tech]] means it is tightly controlled, top-down managed and targeted ''abstractly'' at a ''perceived'' demand and an ''anticipated'' future state,<ref>[[Thought leader]]s are no better at predicting the future of [[Legal services delivery|legal services]] than they have been at anything else.</ref> neither of which will necessarily address the exact problem a ''specific'' user is trying to solve, nor continue to cope with it, as that problem develops. [[Reg tech]], if not continually maintained, is innately prone to [[planned obsolescence|unplanned obsolescence]].

'''''[[Rent-seeking]]''''' in that no [[reg tech]] provider has figured out a business model for how to be suitably paid, other than by extracting [[rent]]. This they commonly do by reference to the ''value'' their product provides, which they equate to the ''total cost of labour and infrastructure it saves''.  

Historians, and lovers of crushing irony, will note the resemblance of this notion to the [[labour theory of value]] — that the economic value of a service is equals the total amount of labour required to produce it — or in this case, that you would have to hire to produce it ''without this new piece of kit''. Why “ironic”? Because it is odd to hear a bedrock intellectual foundation of ''Marxism'' babbling from the mouths of small-time [[rentier capitalist]]s, that’s why.

Cynics might wonder how these [[reg tech]] [[thought leader]]s  can ''know'' how much money their technology will save, and how much time they have spent calculating the indirect costs of its implementation.

Should we be so fixated on cutting the wage bill of a handful of school-leavers in Sarajevo, that we will pay a guy in Old Street for code he bought from some school-leavers in Bucharest, if the price is that he can intermediate our process for the hereafter, adding nothing but the cheerful chime of a clipped ticket each time his machine spits out another document, or even just while our documents collect dust on his server (this is called “hosting”)?

Wasn’t the promise of the information revolution something grander than that? Wasn’t stuff meant to be ''free'', not just ''marginally cheaper and more complicated''?

===[[Iatrogenic|The cure and the disease]]===

'''''[[Iatrogenic]]''''' — it is a cure that is worse than the disease<ref>This is a super concept and if you haven’t come across it you owe it to yourself and {{author|Nassim Nicholas Taleb}} to read about it in his superbly bombastic {{br|Incerto}} series.</ref> — in that in promising to ''alleviate'' the [[tedium]] of the [[boilerplate]], pernickitiness and low-level wrangling over [[representations and warranties]], technology throws open the window wide on a panoramic vista of unlimited low-level tinkering. The cost of infinite pedantry has ''dropped through the floor''.  

Before the information revolution, the [[Anal paradox|anality]] of contracts was bounded by any lawyer’s natural capacity — deep, to be sure, but ultimately finite — to hold a superstructure of piecemeal salutary conditionality in her head. With a laptop and an adeptness with JavaScript, that limit has now been taken away. [[Contract]]s can be infinitely pedantic, variable, customisable. We can cater for any [[Pedantry|predilection]], whim, [[For the avoidance of doubt|doubt]] or [[proviso]]. We can find and propagate [[Biggs constant]]s at will. We can put one in every line, if that is our wish. We can command that a space between words must be ''italic''. When the great [[J. M. F. Biggs]] first isolated and documented a [[Biggs hoson]] in the wild — the celebrated [[bold full stop]] in a “Boats” [[repackaging]] — it was a once-in-a-generation event.

This should not be a surprise. The invention of the word-processor did not ''shorten'' legal discourse. The arrival of email did not truncate the nature or volume of our communication. Andy gaveth, but it was not Bill, but our ''innate gift for verbal diarrhoea'' that tooketh away.  

 

Note the misalignment of interests here: those providing the “cure” have a direct incentive — in fact, a ''need'' — to ''continue'' helping, because that is how they get paid. They design their disintermediating machines to only disintermediate ''so far'': users must remain sufficiently dependent on their code, their systems and their expertise, that they are obliged to pay an annuity for it. To pay ''[[rent]]''.<ref>I have lost count of the times that that a tech provider has told me users cannot have edit or configuration rights on a simple piece of configuration. There are two explanations for this, and neither is edifying: one is that the software is so fragile or poorly designed that allowing a user to tinker with it will make it break; another is that it is so basic that allowing users to tinker with it will reveal how simple it is.</ref>

Our friends in the [[management consulting]] profession (also [[rent-seeker]]s, needless to say) encourage this disposition through the dogma of [[outsourcing]]. Here the gist is: if you have a convoluted process that is costing you time and money, [[Outsourcing|outsource]] it, to someone better specialised, incentivised and remunerated to do it, who can do it cheaper, better and — thanks the magic of {{author|Adam Smith}}’s invisible hand — at the optimal cost. In this way do we ''entrench'' [[rent-seeker]]s, by building an entire ([[rent-seeking]]) infrastructure around this newly articulated [[process]] — with its own [[middle management]], [[operations]], [[compliance]], [[internal audit]], [[procurement]], you name it — without ever asking whether the process was that important in the first place.  

But the new machinery is so costly to remove, that it is easier just to live with it, from time to time tweaking it, optimising it, adjusting it, relocating it from a service centre in Bangalore to one in Manilla, ''every little fiddle keeping that entire [[Bureaucracy|bureaucratic]] iron lung fully engaged''. And no [[management consultant]] will tell you the obvious truth: had you ''decomplicated'' the process in the first place — just got rid of it — perhaps giving away some peripheral protections in the mean time, ''none of this would have been necessary''.  

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Here is a challenge: one day, out of the blue, ask a risk officer to explain, exactly, what [[cross default]] is and how it works. On the spot. No phone-a-friend. No ask-the-audience. Expect blank looks and notebooks.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_the_Silent_Age.</ref>

[[Mick Jagger]] and [[Keith Richards]] composed [[Satisfaction]] in 15 minutes whilst sitting by a pool in Florida. They are still, 55 years later, reaping colossal dividends from that inspired quarter hour. Fair play to them: this may be what the law prescribes, but it is bad law and it is a horrible model for [[reg tech]].

 

This is a profoundly ''awful'' disposition. There is ''nothing'' — utterly nil — that is special, clever or even ''desirable'' about legal [[boilerplate]].  

To behold [[boilerplate]] is to witness [[marginal utility]] at the point it touches zero. [[Legal]] [[negotiation]] is the dreary formality one must go through ''to get to the heart of the deal''. The same goes for that ISDA schedule — yes, friends, the whole god-forsaken thing, even the customised {{isdaprov|ATE}}s. No-one ''cares''. No-one ''likes'' it. No-one ''wants'' it. It is a regrettable externality; a grim fact of life. It is not the sausages; it is [[Ask nicely|the mask you need to put on so you can go into the supermarket]] and ''get'' the sausages.

Recall once again, {{author|Yuval Harari}}’s observation about the domestication of wheat,<ref>Harari’s suggestion, which owes something to [[Douglas Adams]] and his [[The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy|pan-dimensional hyper-intelligent mice]], is that ''wheat'' domesticated ''homo sapiens'' and not ''vice versa''. See https://www.ynharari.com/topic/ecology/ </ref> and apply it here: is your reg tech implementation and its attendant support structure some kind of [[extended phenotype]] that has evolved: a marvellous beaver dam; an adaptation wrought magically on the environment so delicate but vital process can survive?

Or is it the ''opposite''? Is the ''process'' it purports to fix an adaptation, an [[extended phenotype]] upon which the whole [[rent-seeking]] infrastructure depends to survive?  

See [[ClauseHub]] for a high-level technical articulation of the platform.

*[[ClauseHub]]

*[[Why is reg tech so disappointing?]]