Future of Law and Innovation Conference struggled with the technology … Plentiful lunch options …  AI … Kirby adjudicated debate on “Uberisation” of lawyers … How to use LinkedIn … Space law … Techno fonts … Lawyerly prospects when technology fails … Justice in the era of “late capitalism” … Theodora reports 

Mitch Kowalski, the Gowling WLG Visiting Professor in Legal Innovation at the University of Calgary, opened the show with a talk about “lawyering in 2050”. His presentation was perfectly executed and would not have looked out of place on TED.com. 

Mitch told us that lawyers should be driven by customer “servitude” and explained how the old business school cliché, “sell holes, not drills,” applies to legal practice. 

His managerial philosophy was summarised in a quote from the “founder of modern management,” Peter Drucker: 

“In the Next Society’s corporation, top management will be the company. Everything else can be outsourced.” 

The end of his address was marked by the playing of loud electronic dance music while the words “THOUGHT LEADERSHIP” bounced onto the screen. 

After noting that the subject was confusingly drafted in the negative, and excluded people who were not Australian lawyers, the adjudicator asked whether Mabo could have been produced by an artificially intelligent High Court? 

Thoughts having been provoked, the debaters then focused on economic analysis, with both teams agreeing that Uberisation meant a largely inevitable future in which the unwashed would be permitted to perform the work traditionally reserved to lawyers.

Both teams also thought that technology was likely to improve access to justice while at the same time creating a risk of malpractice and miscarriages of justice. 

The affirmative (anti-Uber) team pointed to the resources consumed by unrepresented litigants and the practical uselessness of artificially intelligent chatbots. 

The negative observed that consumers benefited from Uber’s disruption of the taxi industry, obtaining “lower” fares and the new power to threaten a worker’s continued employment with a sub-five-star rating. 

Kirby awarded the debate to the negative team, and gave an honourable mention to the most engaging oralists, Philippe Doyle Gray and Talitha Fishburn, both from the bar ‘n’ grill. 

Outside the plenary sessions, the conference featured a bewildering schedule of short presentations in three concurrent streams – such as how to use LinkedIn profile shots and headlines to create an image that appeals to budget managers, what’s involved in space law, and the allocation of risk between large corporations in different jurisdictions. 

There were numerous posters using the Tron font which, apparently, invited speculation about upcoming “micro-niches” like “digital sports law” and the “employment law of microchipping employees”. 

The obligatory mental health speaker, Mitch Wallis, described the avoidable, deteriorating condition of mental health in Australian society, and the complex array of economic incentives behind the shocking statistics on lawyers’ mental health in particular. He concluded that the system was bad and therefore must change. 

Thanks, Mitch. 

There followed a live webcast by Professor Richard Susskind, whose books The Future of the Professions and Tomorrow’s Lawyers are widely cited by legal futurists. 

The final plenary session was delivered by Shara Evans, a professional futurist speaker whose website touts her ability to “tie into strategic insights specifically for your business … regardless of your industry”. 

She ranged in her presentation from drones, robots, Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, automated surveillance technology, 3D printing, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, autonomous vehicles, deepfakes, Elon Musk’s Neuralink, and quantum computing. 

By way of tying into strategic insights for the legal profession she noted that most of this technology is likely to fail horribly at some point, resulting in lots of litigation.

She was not happy with the delivery of justice as a service under late capitalism. 

“I think it’s likely the need for a commercialisable model that’s holding back the implementation of this but we’ll get there eventually.” 

Her vision of the future included “cities in outer space” established by “private entrepreneurs” and this sort of enterprise would entail a lot of transactional work for lawyers.

Courageously, this question was handed over to the audience for a vote using the conference app. Delegates had previously been exhorted to use this app to earn digital points in exchange for attending events. 

Shara was stunned by the audience’s apparent lack of sympathy and quickly moved on to a hypothetical restaurant where all of the staff are robots. The bar chart remained on screen, indicating in very small type that a total of three votes were received. 

This technology has some distance to go before it will be competitive with a show of hands.