Abstract Legal professionals spend much if not most of their time listening to others, including clients, witnesses, co-workers, and judges. And yet, lawyers are notorious for being poor listeners. Perhaps this helps explain why the legal profession consistently gets ranked as one of the least trusted professions. The primary reasons for clients’ dissatisfaction have more to do with…
Law, Artificial Intelligence, and Natural Language Processing: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Search Results
Abstract Renowned legal educator Roscoe Pound stated, “Law must be stable and yet it cannot stand still.” Yet, as Susan Nevelow Mart has demonstrated in a seminal article that the different online research services (Westlaw, Lexis Advance, Fastcase, Google Scholar, Ravel and Casetext) produce significantly different results when researching case law. Furthermore, a recent study of 325…
Augmented Lawyering
Abstract How will artificial intelligence (AI) and associated digital technologies reshape the work of lawyers and structure of law firms? Legal services are traditionally provided by highly-skilled humans — that is, lawyers. Dramatic recent progress in AI has triggered speculation about the extent to which automated systems may come to replace humans in legal services. A related debate is whether…
A Critical Analysis of the Online Court
Abstract It is no secret that many judicial systems across the globe are stumbling beneath a heavy burden of thousands of suits filed every year in court. The need to optimize the judicial system of England and Wales led Lord Justice Briggs to write a comprehensive report about the subject, in which he suggests the…
Legal Tech and EU Consumer Law
Abstract Legal Tech (LT) products and services automate certain tasks that lawyers usually perform. The use of these tools in business-to-consumer (B2C) markets create many opportunities for consumers and the justice system in general, but also raises concerns in terms of access to justice, choice and information, quality, fairness, redress and representation. This paper deals with…
Is Legal Education Over-Regulated or Under-Regulated?
Abstract Posing the challenges facing legal education as concerned with its under- or over-regulation is the wrong question. Instead, we need to cast fresh eyes on the question of legal education beyond the binary of over-and under-regulation. This paper identifies three inter-related factors that reveal the inadequacy of our long-standing discourse on the regulation of Australian legal education: the misapprehension as to…
A Conversation About Canadian Legal Education: Lakehead University and Dialogue Pedagogy
Abstract Through my experiences opening the first new law school in Ontario in 44 years, I have had time to reflect on my own teaching style and have employed what has been termed “Dialogue Pedagogy.” Using an auto-ethnography methodology in this paper, I will examine ways of teaching the law including the case-law system of…
The Pandemic Syllabus
Abstract A syllabus is a contract, an introduction, a statement of values, a todo list, a plan. It is often the point of first contact between professor and student, or between student and an area of law. Beyond the technological challenges, for many professors Fall 2020 was also the first-time coming up with a camera…
Keeping Lawyers’ Houses Clean: Global Innovations to Advance Public Protection and the Integrity of the Legal Profession
Abstract Around the globe regulators are rethinking the scope of their mandates and responsibilities. They are assuming more expansive roles rather than limiting their efforts to disciplining lawyers after misconduct occurs. This Article examines such regulatory initiatives in three areas. First, it discusses developments related to proactive management-based programs in which regulators partner with lawyers…
A Unified Theory of Data
Abstract How does the proliferation of data in our modern economy affect our legal system? Scholars that have addressed the question have nearly universally agreed that the dramatic increases in the amount of data available to companies, as well as the new uses to which that data is being put, raise fundamental problems for our…