From neuron to network
Lawyers tired of their vocation could find themselves in a new role - as 'legal information engineers'
January 21, 1999 at 07:16 AM
3 minute read
Linklaters takes its virtual lawyering very seriously.
"Blue Flag is a virtual lawyer," says project head Paul Nelson. "Clients take advice in exactly the same way as they would from one of our lawyers.
There are no exemption clauses in the Blue Flag system which can be used as a get-out if the advice is faulty."
So what future role will lawyers have in this brave new legal climate increasingly populated by their virtual colleagues?
Richard Susskind says in the future most lawyers will be more accurately described as 'legal information engineers' – those who will build the expert advice systems with which clients do business.
His prophecy is already taking shape. Christopher Millard and Mark Ford at Clifford Chance both see themselves as legal information engineers in a very real sense. Both spend at least half of their working time building and fine-tuning the NextLaw system.
At Linklaters seven lawyers are exclusively dedicated to maintaining and developing the 10,000-page Blue Flag system.
And Nelson, the partner in charge of Blue Flag, says more than 70 people at Linklaters and other overseas legal firms are involved in maintaining the system in 30 jurisdictions across the globe.
Millard, a former president of the Society for Computers and Law and the first Clifford Chance partner to have a PC on his desk, says the firm regularly has 30 people involved in the NextLaw project, covering about 30 jurisdictions.
Add to this the fact that both firms are in the process of developing yet more systems for different practice areas, and the number of people involved in legal information engineering must already be in the hundreds.
But what kind of lawyer wants to give up the opportunity to get out there and meet the client, instead choosing to retreat to the legal laboratory to build the next generation of virtual lawyers?
According to Nelson: "Some lawyers get bored with doing transactions.
They are interested in applying their experiences in a different context.
"They find it a challenge to deconstruct the thought processes of the live lawyer and to reshape them in a virtual context."
Nelson also quashes the thought that legal information engineering jobs might go to more junior lawyers. "At no point has anyone with less than nine years experience been near Blue Flag. "This is legal advice and it must be right."
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