By David Kumagai, 2L
“Where is the iPhone of law?”
That was the question Professor Gillian Hadfield asked an audience of more than 50 students and professors at this year’s David B. Goodman Lecture in Emmanuel College, Oct. 10.
“The [legal] systems that we have invented do not work the way we need them to anymore,” said the professor of law and economics from the University of Southern California – and the answer may lie in Silicon Valley – where lawyers can learn from how the world’s leading tech prodigies tackle their problems.
The crux of her lecture, “Reimaging Law”, was that the legal community needs to start looking at old challenges from radically new vantage points. “We are hearing that law is too expensive, too complex, too slow, and not doing what we need it to do,” she said. But more of the same is not the answer. “Adding more law does not get us more legal order.”
Although her prescription was more complex than a simple mimicking of Silicon Valley, Prof. Hadfield argued that the legal profession can learn from how the tech industry is constantly shifting paradigms.
She posed a series of questions that challenged the audience to look at law’s old-hat problems with fresh eyes:
Can law produce legal order without government enforcement? Can developing countries outsource regulation and legal services? Can private entities compete to provide regulatory regimes subject to legislated performance criteria? Can legal contracts be pictures or programs?
Google it
Prof. Hadfield pinpointed the exclusivity of the legal profession as a major reason why legal reform has been trapped inside a box for so long.
The success of search-engine giant Google ought to be an instructive example for how to break the mould, she argued.The expectation when the Internet was created was that we would find information online by using librarians, she said, just as we did before the Internet. But Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were not librarians. They came at the problem from a totally different perspective.
“If we see design needs in law, we see that as design work for lawyers. Most of the work done on legal reform around the world is done by lawyers and judges, in a way that is quite distinct from the rest of development,” she said. “Where are the garage guys in law?”
Prof. Hadfield suggested that lawyers need to loosen their iron grip on all things legal related, and embrace the need for more types of legal professionals.
The conventional “solutions” have proven futile time and again, Prof. Hadfield argued. Drafting new laws, mandating new forms of law school training, expanding Alternate Dispute Resolution, creating new courts and negotiating new treaties have been tried time and again – with limited success.
New age solutions
Prof. Hadfield championed the United Kingdom’s Legal Services Board, an independent body tasked with approving regulators of the legal profession. The board is composed primarily of non-lawyers, a fact that she suggested may be crucial to its success.
She also raised Honduras as an example of a more radical reform idea. The developing country has explored the creation of “charter cities,” independent city states that operate using their own distinct laws within a larger country.
Third-year law student Hani Migally was among the students who attended the Goodman Lecture. “I think we all left with an appreciation of the fact that the typical problems faced in our legal system, and the corresponding public disenchantment with our regime, won’t be fixed if we continue to implement typical solutions,” Migally said.
“But it’s clear the answer isn’t straight-forward. We can’t simply transplant ideas of innovation and experimentation from business into law, where the stakes and consequences of failure are far more drastic.”
Ultimately, Prof. Hadfield insisted that lawyers need to take more responsibility for the problems plaguing the legal system. “We don’t have a strong understanding of our ethical obligations regarding legal design.” Lawyers have designed the current legal regime, she said, and thus ought to be responsible for how it works and the problems it has.
As for what Apple’s ubiquitous gadget can teach the profession?
“The iPhone has a lot of complex stuff that it is capable of doing, but the interface is simple, elegant and accessible,” she said. “The more complex problem does not always imply that it must have a more complex solution.”
See the story about the lecture in Canadian Lawyer Magazine
The D.B. Goodman Fellowship was established in memory of the late David B. Goodman, Q.C. of Toronto by members of his family, friends and professional associates with the intention of bringing to the law school, on an annual basis, a distinguished member of the practising bar or bench for a few days of teaching and informal discussions with the student body and faculty.
Gilian Hadfield is the Kirtland Professor of Law, professor of economics, and the director of the Center for Law and Social Science at the USC Gould School of Law (California).
