White Flag Over Coderoom and Conference Room
An Editorial
EDITORIAL –
WHITE FLAG OVER CODEROOMS AND CONFERENCE ROOMS
It is a simple analysis.
Programmers or developers or engineers what have you are a highly technical highly insular “priest class” who can accomplish the aims of the ‘real world’ in ways we can only imagine but we cannot understand.
Lawyers same. They hold the keys, verily, to “justice” itself. When we bring out concerns to them, they mix a special brew of talent, experience, and law to craft the very best solution which we appreciate deeply, and yet “don’t know how they did that.”
They are one of a piece and yet together until now have been like oil and water.
The 80M Atrium attempt by Justin Kan and the team had noble goals and ambitions. Let us marry the two for the betterment of the law. Ultimately, this writer believes what was attempted was to enable an old model with new technology. This created an arbitrage of interests and a power struggle between the former which was bent on building the new, and the latter which was wedded to existing structures (a) because it was the only they knew and had perfected, and (b) because it was the most profitable they could conceive of.
Harvard Business School once called the law firm model, “the most successful revenue generating structure in history.”
And yet time and events have a way of forcing us off of our previous premises. If not for survival, for the greater good we can dimly see in the distance.
No, the solution shall be not to add technological seasoning to the law. It shall not be to lawyer hack code to do its purposes.
A new model is needed, and not only needed but in front of us.
Law is nothing other than data. Data in various forms of statute, caselaw, precedent, formbook, opinion, technique, stratagem. To unlock this data Law needs the data warriors. And the data warriors need lawyers to curate, to affirm and to qa.
And so, a truce is proposed. One table. One terminal. One project. One methodology. Conjoining volatile experts. Only by each expert category ceding its own term turf for its own uncertain benefit can each and all realize the once in an ever promise to reshape and remake the law.
It is no white flag of surrender, for surrender is not the aim. But it is the best starting point.