Markus Gunneflo
Senior lecturer
Legal Tech, the Law Firm and the Imagination of the Right Legal Answer
Author
Summary, in Swedish
Legal tech is growing, and its growth provokes anxieties about the future of the
legal profession as such. In this article, we examine the impact of legal tech on the
central role of lawyers at law firms in crafting an imagined ‘right legal answer’ by
drawing on Duncan Kennedy’s suggestion that a claim to the rightness of one’s
legal propositions is a central characteristic of the legal profession. We first ask
how changes in the organisation of legal services affect the ability of lawyers at
law firms to produce that ‘right legal answer’. While legal tech only exacerbates
already ongoing processes of eradication of routine tasks, we find that it continues
to mask the role of ideology in arriving at a right legal answer under a new layer
of technological projection. Second, we ask how lawyers’ ability to produce ‘the
right legal answer’ is affected by, first, expert systems and, second, a legal tech ap-
plication named Bryter, representing a no-code system. We find that expert systems
do not permit to uphold the unity of the lawyer required for Kennedy’s model of
the right legal answer, but that no-code systems as Bryter do so. No-code systems
can be reduced to a slogan: Have the lawyer, but evict her ideological temptations
more efficiently than before!
legal profession as such. In this article, we examine the impact of legal tech on the
central role of lawyers at law firms in crafting an imagined ‘right legal answer’ by
drawing on Duncan Kennedy’s suggestion that a claim to the rightness of one’s
legal propositions is a central characteristic of the legal profession. We first ask
how changes in the organisation of legal services affect the ability of lawyers at
law firms to produce that ‘right legal answer’. While legal tech only exacerbates
already ongoing processes of eradication of routine tasks, we find that it continues
to mask the role of ideology in arriving at a right legal answer under a new layer
of technological projection. Second, we ask how lawyers’ ability to produce ‘the
right legal answer’ is affected by, first, expert systems and, second, a legal tech ap-
plication named Bryter, representing a no-code system. We find that expert systems
do not permit to uphold the unity of the lawyer required for Kennedy’s model of
the right legal answer, but that no-code systems as Bryter do so. No-code systems
can be reduced to a slogan: Have the lawyer, but evict her ideological temptations
more efficiently than before!
Department/s
- Department of Law
- Human Rights Law
- Public International Law
Publishing year
2023-10-10
Language
Swedish
Publication/Series
Law and Critique
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Springer
Topic
- Law
Keywords
- Folkrätt
- Public international law
Status
Published
Research group
- Human Rights Law
- Public International Law
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 0957-8536