Legal technology

The JC pontificates about technology An occasional series. Go Premium Technology Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

No, not chat-bots, AI, metadata extraction, fuzzy logic or semantic syntactical parsing. Legal technology is the real-life code that lawyers generate day in and day out: words.

Should lawyers learn to code? My oath, they should. Because for the best paid professional writers on the planet, lawyers can't write for shit. See: IT strategy

Addressing the barnacle risk

Strategic over tactical: When drafting and updating templates *always* prioritise strategic over tactical. Say a new regulation has been introduced (I mean, just imagine!) which poses the question whether an existing form should be updated:

• really, does it? Challenge whether any change is necessary
  • on economic grounds (could we lose money? How much? Realistically, how likely?)
  • on regulatory grounds (could we be in breach of the law? What are the consequences?)
  • on reputational grounds (could this affect the firm's franchise? How?)
• If the issue is important look to do so in a way that shortens and simplifies:
  • take out specifics and render them as general statements
  • remove optionality and complexity – this is a tech and management imperative.

See also

• Code is law
• Plain English

Plain English Anatomy™ Noun | Verb | Adjective | Adverb | Preposition | Conjunction | Latin | Germany | Flannel | Legal triplicate | Nominalisation | Murder your darlings