Tag: law student

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Bringing Innovation to Law: Think like Elon Musk

  1. Introduction

The legal industry is in need of ideas for change and innovation, and I found just the person to look to.

 

Elon Musk is the founder of SpaceX, and the co-founder of Tesla Motors and SolarCity.

 

With SpaceX, his goal is to make humans a multi-planetary species. In Tesla, his vision, dubbed the ‘Master Plan,’ involves creating a fully electric car that is affordable and can be manufactured at high volumes. Using SolarCity, he plans to create low-cost sustainable energy by harnessing the power of the Sun.

 

iron-man
“Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?” image credits: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/underwire/2010/04/im_large_660.jpg

Before that, he was the founder of Zip2 and Paypal. The former was a software company that designed online city guides, and the latter is an electronic online payment platform.

 

He is the closest thing to a real life Tony Stark that lives in our time.

 

So how does a man who started his career in software engineering end up being at the forefront in aerospace, automotive, and solar energy? There are many things that lawyers and law students can learn from a man that is attempting to change the landscape of 3 gigantic industries.

 

Here I have offered 2:

  • First Principles Reasoning; and
  • Learning Transfer

 

  1. First Principles Reasoning

Musk describes that one of his core philosophies that guides his method of thinking is called First Principles reasoning.

 

First Principles, Musk describes, is a physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to its most fundamental principles, stripping away all the assumptions that we have accumulated about the topic, and then reason up from there.

 

He gives an example of a battery pack in an electric car. Historically, a battery pack costs $600 per kilowatt hour. The assumption is that battery packs are expensive. As a car manufacturer, you take that assumption as an unchangeable fact and figured you will just have to integrate that cost into the price of the car.

 

With first principles, a person would attack that assumption. You boil the battery pack down to its fundamental principles and look at what are the material constituents of the battery, how much those materials would cost, and how much it would cost to assemble them into a battery. If you realize that it will actually only cost you $80 per kilowatt hour, you have now changed what everyone else took for as a fact.

 

As law students and lawyers, our challenge is to identify the assumptions built into our legal industry that we had accepted as fact over time.

 

For example, take the cost of legal services. In a 2015 Canadian Lawyer legal fees survey, the average hourly rate of a 10-year call was $360 per hour, and the national average cost of a 5-day trial is $56,439. The assumption is that legal services are expensive, have always been expensive, and will always be expensive.

 

Let’s take a first principles approach. Attack that assumption. Boil down the cost to its fundamental parts, and take a look at what components are no longer needed or can be changed.

 

Take a look at what Axiom Legal did. It realized that a big law firm with a large beautiful office space that is located in a prime location garners prestige, but also attracts a massive overhead. Instead, Axiom has its employees working remotely or onsite with their clients, and the result was that Axiom was able to eliminate 30 percent of a traditional firm’s overhead.

 

Another example is the billable hour. Lawyers have been using the billable hour to charge their clients because it is simple, familiar, and is flexible enough to account for the varying times it can take to work on a file. The assumption is that the billable hour is the best way to charge clients because no better method exists. However, the billable hour is unpredictable for clients because they do not know how much they will be billed for, and this allocates the risk to them.

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image credits: http://stevedigioia.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/The-Same-Old-Thinking-e1450563823707.jpg

 

Let’s look at how Hughes Amys LLP has attacked this assumption. Hughes Amys employs an alternative fee arrangement. They use a practice management software to gather data on personal injury files. They looked at the average costs for different claims, the average times it took for these claims to be resolved, and the average awards that were paid out. The firm then presents this data to the client to provide a transparent estimate of how much a flat fee for the month would cost.

 

What other assumptions should we tackle?

 

  1. Learning transfer

Elon Musk has become a leader in many areas of industry such as space exploration, automotive and energy. He is also a leader in many areas of their technology including reusable rockets, self-driving cars, and residential solar roofs.

 

One of the reasons he is so competent in these different areas is because he is very proficient in Learning Transfer. Learning Transfer is a process where you transfer what you learned in one context and apply it to another.

 

Elon Musk is an avid reader and eager learner. According to his brother Kimbal Musk, Elon would read 2 books a day. The books he reads spans multiple disciplines and interest areas, including philosophy, religion, programming, and science fiction. He would also read the biographies of influential figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, J.E. Gordon, and Howard Hughes.

 

Musk then uses what he learns in one industry and applies it to another. Combined with the first principles approach, Musk would deconstruct a field of study into its fundamental principles, compare and contrast these principles with a second field of study, then reconstruct the lessons learned from the first to the second. He has done this to quickly become proficient in the field of artificial intelligence, physics and engineering.

 

As lawyers and law students, how can we apply learning transfer in our practice?

 

In an essay written by Ben Heineman, William Lee, and David Wilkins titled “Lawyers as Professionals and as Citizens: Key Roles and Responsibilities in the 21st Century,” the essay urges lawyers and students to develop complementary competencies in addition to our core competencies.

 

Our core competencies are things like our basic legal training on the main legal subjects such as contracts, torts and property. It also includes legal skills such as critical thinking, analysis, and issue-spotting.

 

However, with new technology such as the artificial intelligence lawyer ‘ROSS’ that can do legal research on an entire body of law faster than what a human can achieve, including legislation, case law and secondary sources, the contemporary lawyer must possess inter-disciplinary knowledge and skills in order to stay competitive in the market.

jealous-husky

 

This is where learning transfer can be useful in developing our complementary competencies. Complementary competencies are things like cost-benefit analysis, creative and constructive thinking, risk management, negotiation, communication, and value-based decision-making.

 

For example, one of the core competencies we develop in law school is issue-spotting. During an exam we are given a fact pattern and, drawing from the topics we’ve learned in that class, we can determine what legal issues need to be analyzed in that question.

 

Now let’s use learning transfer to apply that skill set to another context: negotiations. The fundamental principle in issue-spotting is being able to identify the ‘triggers’ in the fact pattern that tell you what legal rules will be engaged. You can transfer that fundamental principle to negotiations by learning to identify the key information in each negotiating party to determine how much bargaining power each party possesses.

 

As a student trying to become a 21st century lawyer, who better to learn from than the 21st Century Industrialist? There we go, we got a little bit of learning transfer going on right there.

 

  1. Conclusion

The legal industry is notorious for being very conservative. Clients want more value for their money, and new technological advances are threatening the old ways of doing things. Elon Musk is trying to break the status quo in 3 very large industries, and we can learn a lot from him.

 

As law students and future lawyers, we have the controls to choose the direction our profession takes in the coming years. It’s easy for us to be resistant to change and be protective. After all, it feels personal to us because it is our livelihood. However, this is an excellent opportunity for us to be at the forefont in changing how lawyers do their jobs.

 

Or … we could be like Comcast to Google Fiber and bury our heads in the sand. The choice is ours.

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Transitions

Let me give you an image of me as a starting-out lawyer.  I’m on the phone with a client – a terrifying proposition in itself.  Client is talking about something incomprehensible (some Wall Street acronym or something) and assuming I not only know what it is but have an informed and expert opinion about the thing as it relates to the client.  I am googling this thing while on the phone, hoping the client can’t hear me typing.

Transitioning to law school to practice was like that.

One of the reasons L21C exists is that I wanted to try to fill what I think is a gap in legal education in preparing students for this transition, from law student to professional.  Law school does not provide students with much understanding of or information about the practicalities of practice, or about what the ecosystem of the legal services world is like.  It’s a big chasm indeed from pondering the significance of peppercorns to billing, spreadsheets, attempting to tame clients, navigating the internal politics and ego-bruises of working in multiple teams, and googling financial jargon as quietly as possible.

I often hear that it’s not an appropriate goal for law school to prepare students to be “practice-ready,” that there is no substitute for real-world experience and hands-on training.   As far as it goes, I think this is true, even just obvious.  It doesn’t follow, though, that law school can’t do more to prepare students for the transition to practice.  We can, and we should.

That’s the aspiration of L21C: to make students, if not “practice-ready,” at least a bit more ready for the challenges, surprises and mysteries of the coming transition to practice.  To demystify the mysteries, make at least some of the surprises less surprising, and, I hope, stir up some excitement about the challenges.

L21C is also transitioning this year.  Last year it was a completely brand-new course, still a prototype really, and I really was not sure what to expect.  This year is … well, honestly not that different, but it’s no longer completely brand new and I have a little bit more idea what to expect.  Last year’s class was a fantastic group who did some truly inspirational work.  Therefore, my expectations are very high.  I’m looking forward to equally great things from this year’s group, possibly even greater.  Go on, challenge yourselves!

The design of the course is substantially the same as it was last year, but there are some modifications.  The first few weeks are more structured, with fewer guest speakers and more lectures and activities that I planned.  In the later weeks we have many really amazing guest speakers, a panel, a field trip to Kamloops Innovation Centre, and plenty of time built in for teams to work on their LawHacks projects.  The idea is that in the first part of the semester students will get a solid understanding, from the lectures, readings and class activities, of the themes we are covering, and in the later part of the semester the group will be very well equipped to engage with the wonderful leaders and thinkers who are joining us as guests.

Of course I can’t end a post about transitions without mentioning the central focus of this course, the Big Transition: what’s happening to the profession itself.

Richard and Daniel Susskind, the authors of one of our course books (The Future of the Professions), say that the legal world “will change more radically over the next two decades than over the last two centuries” and the legal profession is “on the brink of unprecedented upheaval” (pp. 66-67, internal citations omitted).

Jordan Furlong, writing in the Canadian Bar Association Legal Futures Initiative publication Do Law Differently: Futures for Young Lawyers – another of our course texts – says “[a]lmost everything about career choices and employment options for new lawyers is in flux,” and that the generation of lawyers entering practice now “has both an obligation and an opportunity that its predecessors never experienced.”

David Scott, the co-chair of Borden Ladner Gervais, has said that the lack of access to justice for ordinary people is the legal profession’s equivalent of global warming.

These are the big, systemic transitions that we are going to learn, think and share ideas about in the course.  I hope that the discussion will carry on outside class – and will engage the wider community.  That’s what the blog is for, and I’m really excited to read posts and comments by our new class of L21C partners, as well as everyone else who wants to join the conversation.

This time of year people often say that September, not January is the real new year.  It’s a time of transitions.  Here we go!

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The Road to (Legal) Innovation

First, I would like to start by congratulating the class on the successful completion of the Law Hacks presentations. I thoroughly enjoyed all the presentations which exposed me to some great ideas regarding legal innovation. I am excited to know that at least one of those ideas, Summons, is already on its way to becoming reality; I hope that more follow. As we look towards our future and the innovation of legal practice, there is a caveat to be considered.

In his article “The failure of legal innovation“, Jordan Furlong introduces the readers to the nature of the start-up market. Furlong points out that we live in the age of start-ups, a phenomenon that brings about significant social and economic benefits, but one which is characterized by the risk of failure. For every successful start-up, there are far more failed ones. As Furlong points out, the reason for failure is not always a bad idea, sometimes its bad execution, or worse still, pure bad luck. The point that he is trying to drive home is that there are immense challenges in the way of start-ups, which we got a taste of by getting grilled by the ‘dragons’.

As we learned during the semester, the legal profession is going through a transitional period as we play catch-up with the technological advancements. As much as it scary, it is a good sign that we have chosen the route of innovation rather than extinction.  It is no doubt that the need of the hour is investment in bold and fresh new ideas. However, I would like to add one caveat to this process: know when to stop. As mentioned earlier, a start-up’s failure isn’t always due to a bad idea; there are numerous other variables that account for success. Therefore, it is important to know when to give up on an idea, lest we end up chasing down a rabbit hole.

As part of the first graduating class of L21C at TRU Law, we are well on our way to start contributing meaningfully to the transition. The challenges ahead of us, as lawyers, are greater in way because lawyers don’t like to be told that they have been doing something wrong, especially when they hold considerable power in terms of regulating the practice of law. However, incremental changes by way of resilience will make sure that we come out stronger at the end of every battle. As Furlong said “[o]ne LinkedIn or Uber is worth many pets.com”; let’s keep trying for our LinkedIns and Ubers.

Finally, I would like to thank Professor Sykes for putting this innovative course together and introducing us to the future of our legal careers.

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Artificial Intelligence: Shaping the Future of Law

I very much enjoy Sci-Fi movies about artificial intelligence, but I am not particularly keen on being replaced by a machine that can spew out better legal arguments in a milli-second based on an algorithm. The majority of our class discussions have focused primarily on technological innovations in the legal field. Artificial intellegence has been hailed as the future of law. It’s all very exciting, until the foreboding feeling sets in and you’re reminded that not only do you have to compete with 4.0 Bobby for a job, but with a machine as well. According to Michael Cross in his article, Role of Artificial Intelligence in Law, “ a computer is as fresh and alert at 2 am as it was at nine o’ clock the previous morning.” Yeah, well, no arguments there. Computers will always be faster, more efficient and accurate at any given time of the day.

The abstracts from the 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence & Law sum up the relationship between law and artificial intelligence eloquently. Both fields are involved in the process of creation. AI systems are built, experiments are designed and paradigms are replaced. In law, legislation is drafted, precedents are set and beliefs are balanced. Both fields struggle with the complexity of modeling human behaviour. AI aims to recreate human behaviour, while the law intends to drive human behaviour. The meeting of law with AI was inevitable. But where does that leave the plethora of graduating law students and lawyers?

Throughout this class, we have all been reminded of the concept of the “legal sherpa” and helping the ordinary lay person navigate the convoluted path of the law. A more refined role for AI in law is to provide strategic legal guidance. Programs such as ROSS a digital legal expert, built on IBM Watson helps attorneys with their legal research based on plain word searches. This serves as a valuable tool to help guide lawyers in their everyday research. In the end this will make legal profesisonals more effective because they will be able to complete their tasks more efficiently therefore charging the client less for services.

London firm Hodge Jones & Allen has pioneered a predictive model of personal injury case outcomes to assess the predictability of their current caseload. The program will assist the firm in determining which cases have a greater chance of success, therefore allowing the firm to direct their client towards either settling or proceeding with a claim. This is an example of a legal technological advancement in action and in the future personal injury firms and perhaps others as well, may greatly benefit from using such programs.

This new technology will not hinder or replace legal professionals at all. In fact, I see it helping to make the jobs of lawyers easier and more enjoyable. It will also help them bring a wider array of services to their clients in a quicker and more streamlined manner. These advancements will thrust lawyers into more advocacy-based roles because those types of positions cannot be fulfilled by AI, at least not for now. In conclusion, I do not believe that lawyers will ever fully be replaced by AI but it can serve as a useful tool that can better the practice of law.

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Money Can’t Buy Me Happiness… But It Can Buy Me a Boat

If you were to play a game of phrase association with a group of lawyers (and law students for that matter) and give them the phrase “mental health”, I would posit that many of the answers would deal with clients. You would be likely to hear many things: not criminally responsible, fitness to stand trial, and other job related answers.

The troubling part of this thought experiment is that lawyers (and law students) have a strikingly high occurrence of mental health issues but would be very likely to point to the mental issues of others. As is pointed out in the New York Times article by Douglas Quenqua, lawyers are over three-and-a-half times more likely to suffer from depression. The reasons and causes for this are unknown but oft hypothesized. The fact that getting into law school (I would argue it starts even when trying to get into law school) results in an immediate spike in the likelihood of developing depression is a scary proposition. I’m sure that many students understand that they are getting into a difficult profession and one that involves a great deal of stress.

There is something to be said for the fact that lawyers are among the highest paid professions. There is an allure, a draw, and something to be said for the idea that lawyers get into the profession to make more money than they might in another field. This is possibly done at the expense of some personal relationships and free time. Most lawyers go into the job with open eyes and decide to do it despite the downsides.

Lawyers are often of a certain personality type, and I would argue that this personality type is also the reason why lawyers have a higher risk of depression. They are less likely to admit there may be a problem, less likely to seek treatment because of it, and more likely to continue trigger behaviours that exacerbate depression symptoms (read: stress out and drink). Too often depression is seen as a weakness instead of the chemical imbalance that it truly is. The chemical receptors in the brain that allow you to feel happiness do not connect as frequently in a person that suffers from depression.

Quenqua’s main thesis of his article was that lower paid lawyers reported being happier than the more well paid legal professionals. He states that lawyers in the public sector (public defenders and legal aid lawyers) were more likely to report being happy. The most likely rationale for this disparity between public and private is that private sector lawyers are far more likely to be working longer stressful hours. One aspect of public sector and in-house counsel legal work that is often touted as a recruitment tool is that of work-life balance. While not conclusive I believe this is because the expectations of both hours and “billable” work is reduced. As a corollary, the public service lawyers drank less than their higher income counterparts; as noted earlier, alcohol is a depressant. The alcohol may be a “chicken or the egg” argument; the higher-paid lawyers drink more, thus resulting in more unhappiness, or the unhappiness triggers more drinking.

I also take issue with the program at George Washington university, when attending law school many students are unsure of what sort of practice they will be in when they graduate. This is true of most students and speaks to the variety of legal work out there; however, the other major factor at work is the uncertainty of the job market. Many lawyers report finding a firm that they liked following graduation and the firm having an opening or a need in one field or another and “ended up doing x”. I would suggest that while giving students a taste for all the different opportunities is noble, it may also result in a student getting their heart set on one potential stream (abandoning a more broad course load), come out of school seeking only one type of opportunity, only exacerbating the problem of finding a job after law school.

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“More money, more problems?”

As future lawyers, about to embark on a legal career, there is concern that we may be focusing on the wrong rewards…

 

The New York Times article, Lawyers with the Lowest Pay Report more Happiness, written by Douglas Quenqua, suggests that individuals entering the profession are concerned with wealth, status and stimulating work. However, recent research has found that high income and partnership track positions have no correlation with a lawyer’s happiness and well-being. In fact, lawyers in public service positions reported greater happiness. This research study was based on a psychological model of human happiness called “self-determination theory”. The model is based on competence, autonomy and connection to others.

Young Associates in Trouble, a research paper by David Zaring and William Henderson, concludes that most new lawyers are attracted to working for large, prestigious law firms despite their reputation as difficult places to work. The research conducted by Zaring and Henderson suggests that compensation, partnership and resume value are among the reasons these leading firms remain a fixture for new graduates. The authors accept that some young lawyers may see their experience working at an elite firm and the prestige associated with these institutions as a jumping off point into a more enjoyable career path. However, the author’s data indicates that individuals who remain with large firms over the long term do not show higher satisfaction in partnership than they do as junior associates. This is due to a work-life balance that does not necessarily change as the employee moves up the hierarchy.

An explanation for the unhappiness exhibited by young lawyers may begin at law school. Here, students are pushed towards mainstream, elite firms. Large firm marketing, “OCI’s”, and competition among colleagues may be to blame for this.

The articles above suggest that law students do not appreciate what they are signing up for when entering a new firm. Better information from school career centers, depicting “firm life” in large and small firms and urban to rural centers could solve this problem. My view is that there is a general lack of alternatives to big name firms. Schools do not provide students with the necessary explanation of alternatives to firm employment and students lack the knowledge of replacement options.

We have all been told that the profession is changing rapidly and how this may affect our employment opportunities in the near future. It is time for graduates to turn their mind to careers that fall outside of the institutionalized model. Pursuing innovative legal careers may be a solution to the happiness and work life balance young lawyers seek, without sacrificing both lucrative and stimulating work. By taking the approach that change means opportunity, the transformation of the legal landscape should be viewed with excitement rather than fear.

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Technology and Outsourcing – a Change in the Legal Market?

In Blueprint for Change, William Henderson states that the future is bleak for law graduates in the United States because the job market is increasingly uncertain. He writes, “our current legal education is likely to enhance the human capital of our students, but in the emerging economic environment, the benefits of that education are insufficient to pay back its cost […]. The issue is whether the education we offer is able to adapt to the rapidly changing legal industry.”

According to Henderson, the current market is unable to sustain the large numbers of law graduates, and while law schools are having some difficulty filling seats, which ultimately leads to difficulty in finding professional employment for their graduates, they continue to offer attractive financing packages to perspective students, which increases enrollment (and ultimately increases the debt load of graduating students). Additionally, while law schools train students via traditional education models, companies that offer legal products and services (but are not classified as law firms) are becoming increasingly attractive alternatives to hiring lawyers. This in turn decreases the demand for lawyers and leaves many law graduates with an inability to find work in private practice. As Henderson states, “by removing the lawyer from the value chain, cost goes down, quality goes up, and service delivery time becomes faster.”

While Henderson’s research is based on American law schools, I believe that in an era where the legal profession is changing to accommodate self-represented litigants and the entry of ‘do-it-yourself’ products on the legal market, this research adds an extra layer of understanding when it comes to envisioning our futures as lawyers. As my colleague Salman outlined in his blog post “Surviving the Technological Threat,” we have been hearing from our speakers and professors throughout the semester that our current method of practicing law is in danger of changing significantly with respect to new technologies and new methods of outsourcing legal work.

Henderson suggests deviating from the traditional structure and tailoring legal education to fit labour market outcomes, but this does not seem entirely practical for Canadian law schools. While the Canadian legal market is increasingly saturated, we have yet to experience the demise of traditional legal education as Henderson sees it, likely because we have far fewer law schools than the US, and despite our tentative adherence to Maclean’s yearly rankings, our country has yet to implement a tier-based system. As Salman also points out, it is unlikely that the introduction of new technologies will change the legal landscape as a whole. Rather, these technologies will likely assist lawyers to provide more efficient legal services, particularly if lawyers are free to concentrate on more complex legal issues that are outside the scope of these products and technologies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Future Of The Legal Education: Specialization Or Degradation Of The J.D.

As the legal field continues to expand, general practitioners are expected to know more in their respective fields to better assist their clients. A lawyer is expected to enhance their knowledge by keeping up with the evolution of the legal sector. Harry Arthurs recognizes the dangers that future lawyers may face in The Future of Legal Education: Three Visions and a Prediction.

He suggests a possible option where “The bar may one day recognize not just one class of members, but many. Members of each class would have different educational credentials…that general practitioners will one day be licensed to appear as advocates in certain tribunals and the lower courts, and to do routine real estate transactions, simple incorporations and uncontested divorces—but not undertake appellate litigation, patent applications or tax planning”.

He further elaborates “They might offer a skills-based one-year degree for paralegals, a stripped-down tow-year ‘basic’ degree for general practitioners, an enhanced four year degree for specialist practitioners, and conversion courses for those who want to upgrade their credentials”.

On the one hand, I can see this as a form of specialization in a specific area for law students. Those that know what area of law they want to practice can choose to study that, right from the beginning while avoiding all the unnecessary courses that they will never use for their chosen area of practice.

However, on the other hand I see this as undermining the value of legal education and hence a J.D. By creating this separation in the legal education, many of the basic competencies will be omitted from one’s legal education. On a basic level many of the different fields of law interact with each other, and competencies in all these areas are crucial for a practitioner to come up with the best solution for their clients.

There is obviously a wealth of knowledge available in studying law. In my opinion, due to the enhanced level of education required to sufficiently practice in each specific area of law, I think in the future, a LLM in the chosen area of practice will be mandatory after a JD, in order to obtain an articling position in the desired field.

With each area of law expanding everyday, I think it would be ridiculous to cut down on the legal education. The only way to keep up with the evolving nature of the legal sector is to increase the education required, and thus satisfying the necessary requirements of becoming a competent practitioner. Of course, this is just my view.  What do you think are some ways our legal education will evolve to better accommodate us in being competent in our areas of practice for the future?

 

 

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