Abstract Technological breakthroughs challenge core legal assumptions and generate regulatory debates. Practitioners and scholars usually tackle these questions by examining the impacts of a particular technology within conventional legal subjects — say, by considering how drones should be regulated under privacy law, property law, or the law of armed conflict. While individually useful, these siloed analyses mask the repetitive…
Lawyer Regulation in Kiribati
Abstract The Kiribati legal profession developed slowly from 1980 to 1997 and grew rapidly following the establishment of the University of the South Pacific (USP) School of Law. The legal profession in Kiribati may be described as a nascent or proto-profession. While it demonstrates some features of a profession, such as maintaining a monopoly over specialised knowledge and being…
The Place of Non-Advocate Lawyers in Legal Practice in Kenya
Abstract This study observes that Kenya has for a while witnessed an incessant surge in the number of unqualified legal practitioners. The study attributed the same to non-advocate lawyers masquerading as competent advocates. In assessing this, the study determines what legal practice entails and whether rendering legal advice constitutes legal practice. The study then outlines the significance of the jealously monopolistic regulation of the legal profession by…
The Anatomy of Consumer Legal Funding
Abstract Litigant Third-Party Funding (LTPF), where financial companies advance money on a non-recourse basis to individual plaintiffs, is a growing and increasingly controversial industry in the U.S. This funding made headlines during the NFL concussion litigation with more than 1,000 players reported to have received such advances and with class counsel raising concerns of “predatory…
AI and Dispute Resolution
Abstract The office of a judge is nowadays an indispensable part of the system of governance. However, this does not mean that the legal regulation of this area is optimal and this area does not pose any challenges for lawyers. Moreover, there is no general consensus on how state power, including that of the courts, should be exercised….
Legal Education in the Era of COVID-19: Putting Health, Safety and Equity First
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the traditional academic model of gathering people into physical classes into a high-risk activity. Legal education is a Critical Infrastructure sector that supports democratic access to the legal system and trains students to become ethical members of the legal profession and society. Debates about whether legal education should be…
Measuring Lawyer Well-Being Systematically: Evidence from the National Health Interview Survey
Abstract Conventional wisdom says that lawyers are uniquely unhappy. Unfortunately, this conventional wisdom rests on a weak empirical foundation. The “unhappy lawyers” narrative relies on nonrandom survey data collected from volunteer respondents. Instead of depending on such data, researchers should study lawyer mental health by relying on large microdata sets of public health data, such…
Lawyer Regulation Stakeholder Networks and the Global Diffusion of Ideas
Abstract This Article is a companion article to Laurel S. Terry, Global Networks and the Legal Profession, 53 Akron L. Rev. 137 (2019). That article explained why global networks are useful for lawyers and the clients they represent, introduced some of the scientific literature about networks, cited prior literature about (mostly domestic) legal profession networks,…
‘Smart’ Lawyering: Integrating Technology Competence into the Legal Practice Curriculum
Abstract Technology has changed modern law practice. Ethics rules obligate lawyers to understand whether, when, and how to use it to deliver services. But most law schools do not incorporate the so-called “Duty of Technology Competence” into the required curriculum. Despite broad calls for legal education to make students more practice-ready, there is no clear…
Legal Technology: The Great Disruption?
Abstract This paper considers how legal technology, defined here as the use of digital information and communication technologies to automate or part automate legal work process, to provide decision support to legal service providers, and to provide legal information and advice directly to clients/end users, is re-shaping both legal work processes, and the organisation and…