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Digital Technology Law Journal |
David Bausor
Solicitor
Dibb Lupton Alsop (London)
[1] The message of this book is that there is no future for the traditional legal profession if it cannot adapt to the challenge of information technology (`IT'). Susskind is an enthusiastic and innovative advocate of the potential that IT offers for the service that legal professionals can deliver to their clients. While the theoretical premises of the book are relatively underdeveloped, Susskind convincingly seeks to persuade lawyers to use IT to streamline their practices and so reinvent themselves as more general `legal information professionals'. I would particularly recommend this book to those lawyers who are seeking to implement and develop IT in practice.
[2] Susskind's basic argument is that lawyers are an information profession, traditionally focussed on gathering legal knowledge, interpreting that knowledge, and then applying it. That basic paradigm has been changed by IT. IT has had two main effects: it has vastly increased the store of information that makes up `the law', and it is making legal information more readily accessible by non-lawyers. Susskind argues that this increasing pace of technology change means that the growing amount of information that is becoming available to lawyers (and more significantly their clients) means that lawyers must deploy technological means to turn the torrent of data into a trickle of knowledge. It is that distilled knowledge that clients will still pay for - but they will not pay for a legal service if it can be done as well or better electronically.
[3] Susskind sets out the standard factors driving lawyers to use IT such as competition, cost and client demand. Susskind's argument is strongest concerning the problem of information dissemination in an age of hyperregulation, where difficulty arises in the promulgation of increasing volumes of legislation with specialized subject matter and the attendant case law. Susskind's vision of the law's future is of an expanding universe of text - from legislation and cases, to barrister's opinions, expert system output and so on. The use of technology as a text handling and dissemination medium is well explored. There would be few areas of law today where the use of text enabling technologies such as word processing, e-mail and the compiling of legal data in electronic form with the attendant possibility of analysis and retrieval, has not made some inroads. Susskind also factors in the problem of `technology lag', whereby the storage potential of technology exceeds the ability of technology to process and order the information so that it can be utilised. A practical example is the World Wide Web, where there already exists thousands of legal information sources but retrieving relevant information is still an arduous task.
[4] Susskind identifies a `legal information continuum' that moves from technologies such as basic text retrieval systems to diagnostic expert systems. Marrying those techniques with legal information sources allows movement from printed legislation and case law to on-line information services to human legal advisers and specialists, whereby the specific information need of the client can be met by moving along the continuum from left to right - from basic legal information sources and processing to increasingly more complex (and expensive) ones. It is this continuing requirement of information processing that will still enable the lawyer to operate commercially, although the IT revolution is likely to increase the increasing degree of legal specialization. In this context, Susskind describes the operations of `enabling techniques' such as enhanced text retrieval, hypertext, expert systems, and sophisticated and integrated telecommunications. Susskind then suggests how those techniques can play a major part in practice by allowing lawyers to exponentially expand their legal knowledge, manage legal information, and produce focussed and relevant legal information products.
[5] Susskind devotes little time to one of the more noticeable revolutions of IT - the ongoing convergence of information delivery systems. This apparent omission may be the result of focussing on making a good business case for IT that promotes the imminent over the probable as well as the fact that our likely IT futures have changed even in the two years since the book was completed.
[6] Perhaps the most striking and persuasive argument in this book is the identification of a `latent legal market', whereby clients who would otherwise seek legal advice are dissuaded by its cost and incomprehensibility. If it can be realized, this latent legal market is likely to be a major driver for the deployment of IT, since it allows the development of a market for high volume, low margin legal information. This is the sector that traditionally forms the bulk of legal work (eg conveyancing, minor litigation and so on). Susskind argues that there remains a place for the lawyer to provide a more constant and focussed stream of data to a new kind of client, who is more aware of alternative information sources and requires a faster more focussed service. In that processing of information into knowledge comes the value added by the legal professional. That process is akin to the lawyer who can take a contract text and a standard form precedent and draft a contract, but is further stretched by the exponential power of IT.
[7] Susskind's claim in this book is a substantial one, but the book is compelling reading because the trajectory he outlines for the legal profession remains plausible. IT is changing the face of law, on both the micro and macro level. In the last twenty years. the change wrought in legal practice by word processing, allowing multiple drafts of documents, has changed legal practice for all lawyers on a day to day basis. Over the past ten years, the development of scanners, CD-ROM document storage, and other document management technologies have radically changed the nature of litigation, particularly large scale litigation, making fully possible actions that in the past would have been run as a much less major enterprise with a consequent loss in efficiency and completeness. Susskind is ultimately optimistic - after all, the law is an information profession, and by its nature can cope with an information revolution. Whether the former proposition can guarantee the latter outcome remains to be seen.