Why is legaltech so disappointing?: Difference between revisions

Why is legaltech so disappointing? (view source)

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 ===Why is [[reg tech]] so disappointing?===
-[[Document assembly]] has been around for a good 15 years — they thought it was “Lawyer-killing disruptive technology” in 2006<ref>See Darrel R Mountain’s OUP monograph on the subject from 2006 [https://academic.oup.com/ijlit/article-abstract/15/2/170/683915  “Disrupting Conventional Law Firm Business Models using Document Assembly”]</ref> and, well, the [[Mediocre lawyer|cockroaches]] — ''we'' cockroaches — are still here, ladies and gentlemen, and [[document assembly]] technology ''still'' doesn’t work very well. And nor, for all the promise, do many of the other heralded applications in the vanguard of the reg-tech revolution. The things that were supposed to revolutionise legal practice - put junior lawyers out of work — the chatbots; the natural language parsing; the data-extraction — these applications still seem to be eluding us.
+[[Document assembly]] has been around for a good 15 years — they thought it was “Lawyer-killing disruptive technology” in 2006,<ref>See Darrel R Mountain’s OUP monograph on the subject from 2006 [https://academic.oup.com/ijlit/article-abstract/15/2/170/683915  “Disrupting Conventional Law Firm Business Models using Document Assembly”]</ref> and, well, the [[Mediocre lawyer|cockroaches]] — ''we'' cockroaches — are still here, ladies and gentlemen, and [[document assembly]] technology ''still'' doesn’t work very well. And nor, for all the promise, do many of the other heralded applications in the vanguard of the reg-tech revolution. The things that were supposed to revolutionise legal practice - put junior lawyers out of work — the chatbots; the natural language parsing; the data-extraction — these applications still seem to be eluding us.
 Why?
-If advanced technology is magic, then “magic” is in the eye of, and measured from the perspective of, the beholder. When the beholder in question inhabits the [[legal]] or [[compliance]] department the technology doesn’t have to be awfully advanced to seem magical. Especially in a [[proof of concept]]<ref>One could define the [[terms of reference]] of a successful [[POC]] as being extensive enough to show off the clever bits, but limited enough to conceal the rubbish.</ref>.  Your [[sales]]guy airily drops “[[blockchain]]”, “[[chatbot]]”, “[[natural language processing]]”, “[[algorithm]]” and “[[AI]]” into his patter and he will sail through.
+If advanced technology is magic, then “magic” is in the eye of, and measured from the perspective of, the beholder. When the beholder in question inhabits the [[legal]] or [[compliance]] department the technology doesn’t have to be awfully advanced to seem magical. Especially in a [[proof of concept]].<ref>One could define the [[terms of reference]] of a successful [[POC]] as being extensive enough to show off the clever bits, but limited enough to conceal the rubbish.</ref>  Your [[sales]]guy airily drops “[[blockchain]]”, “[[chatbot]]”, “[[natural language processing]]”, “[[algorithm]]” and “[[AI]]” into his patter and he will sail through.
 And so he does.
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 ===What reg tech often ''does'' do===
 In this [[user]]’s experience [[reg tech]] tools tend to invert these priorities:
-*'''Risk reduction''': Unless your [[natural language processing]] is pretty special<ref>It won’t be.</ref>, machines cannot pick up all syntactical, legal nuances. They should be a first-line [[triage]], not a last line: in other words “whatever else you pick up, consider the following”. If the lawyer assumes the machine has read everything other than what it highlights (“I’ve read the whole document and I have found this...” she puts her faith in the interpretative judgment of the machine. Good luck. Risk reduction thus won’t significantly reduce lawyer time (if it does, consider whether you are really risk reducing). It is an ''overlay'' to lawyer time: the lawyer will need to review the whole contract those things beyond the scope of the approved algorithm.
+*'''Risk reduction''': Unless your [[natural language processing]] is pretty special,<ref>It won’t be.</ref> machines cannot pick up all syntactical, legal nuances. They should be a first-line [[triage]], not a last line: in other words “whatever else you pick up, consider the following”. If the lawyer assumes the machine has read everything other than what it highlights (“I’ve read the whole document and I have found this...” she puts her faith in the interpretative judgment of the machine. Good luck. Risk reduction thus won’t significantly reduce lawyer time (if it does, consider whether you are really risk reducing). It is an ''overlay'' to lawyer time: the lawyer will need to review the whole contract those things beyond the scope of the approved algorithm.
 *'''Waste reduction''': Well-targeted AI can take care of simple drafting work on the simple points it does pick up. This would require some skill in natural language parsing but should not be beyond the wit of decent AI.  The application would do the “eighty” while the lawyer does the “twenty”. Typically, reg tech applications get this back to front, purporting to do the big picture stuff (there’s an [[indemnity]]!) and leaving the lawyer to sweat the details in terms of drafting. It would be better for the lawyer to read the draft cold and go “fix the indemnity, change the term to 2 years, restrict disclosure to persons with a need to know, remove the requirement to notify for regulatory disclosures and take out the non-solicitation clause”.
 *'''Empower''': Getting this backward will ''dis''empower the lawyer: This is the machine purporting to spot the big issues and assigning the lawyer to do the manual process. This reduces the lawyer to being a sort of grammarian.
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 {{sa}}
 *[[Reg tech]]
+{{ref}}