Legaltech landscape: Difference between revisions

The possibility of even building the consensus to implement a comprehensive front-to-back system, let alone specifying it, let alone actually implementing it, and more to the point, persuading all the squabbling stakeholders to abandon their present system work-arounds, would be quite impossible even if your desired end-game was not a moving target. The localised, ramshackle, rag-tag fugitive fleet of hacks and workarounds has that advantage: it can and generally will flow, melds and work-around, however inefficiently and unprettily, to cope with whatever demand is thrown at it. It has at least the flexibility of a bottom up ecosystem: top-down central planning will work hard to beat that in the long run.

One is to invite all stakeholders to imagine a perfect, machine-age end state, however fantastical, and encourage them to develop their own systems ''toward'' that. You may never get to that destination — it may be impossible, or have winked out of existence, or lost its allure by the time you get there, but at least open the nearest door in that direction that puts you in a better place than the one you are in now. Evolve away from unsatisfactory now: nudge yourself in the direction of what looks like a more satisfactory future. That may ''change'' your options, but it doesn’t cut off them off — every room in the palace of adjacent possibilities has many doors opening off it.