Trees, Forests and Clouds: The A2J Fantasy

In a bit of typical twitter silliness, a truncated discussion broke out following the Stanford Law School CodeX lie-fest. Too mean? Okay, how about circle jerk? Still too mean? Jeez, tough crowd. Let’s try, well-intended but clueless gathering. That’s the best I’m going to do, so suck it up.

One piece of the discussion addressed the self-serving contention that legal tech was the savior of the poor and downtrodden who couldn’t afford legal representation, access to justice, or A2J. I called bullshit.

They wrap themselves up in their white knight armor under the A2J banner, all the while concerned only with whether they can sell their gadget and make a fortune. Don’t be shocked at the hypocrisy and ignorance. These are desperate people, constantly staring failure in the face, in critical need of facile excuses that shift the blame for their ugly, unwanted babies to anyone but them.

How absurd are these self-proclaimed heroes of the poor? When I twitted that if they were serious, they would want serious lawyers to speak at their insular conferences about what law is, lawyers do, clients need, so they would stop creating shiny, worthless gimmicks that fail miserably. The response from the “dumber than dirt” side (apologies to dirt) was:


Children like to blame it on money, tainting their detractors with filthy lucre. One might suspect that these profit-hopeful enterprises wouldn’t confuse themselves with charities for the betterment of mankind, but when you’re thick as a brick (apologies to bricks), the knee-jerk retorts of third-graders come naturally.

But the more serious, and more seriously disturbing, reaction comes from the elder statesmen of bullshit.


In fairness, this is the sort of nonsense that the legal tech folks tell each other so they don’t feel badly about being failures, so it’s unsurprising that someone will spew such utter nonsense with sincerity.  So what if they do this to become the next Zuckerberg? When you live in an echo chamber of self-serving bullshit, it makes you feel less like a pathetic failure and blatant liar by pretending that your dreams of fabulous wealth are really all about helping the poor. It helps you to not have to cry yourself to sleep at night.

Contrary to a world where fortune cookie claims serve as a substitute for intelligent thought, it’s time to clear up the foundational lie: legal tech is not the cure to the access to justice disease. At its best, it can offer tweaks around the edges, palliatives that the ignorant substitute for fixes because they want to believe so very much that they are contributing something, and will eventually make big money when those nasty risk averse lawyers finally adopt their ugly baby.

But that doesn’t mean that legal tech can’t do more, do better, to facilitate (or as Bob Ambrogi calls it, “enhance,” which is much clearer) the delivery of legal services. And in some instances, it’s happening, though the impact is negligible because the value is puny in comparison to the magnitude of the problem.

So how does legal tech actually contribute to making the law more efficient, effective, accessible and available to those who can’t afford legal representation?  That’s where the peanut gallery comes in, where the “voices accusing others of a lack of seriousness” are damn helpful.

The circle jerk of legal tech entrepreneurs hasn’t got a clue what lawyers need and want, what helps clients and doesn’t.  You’re not serious. You’re goofy and self-serving, arguing why your baby isn’t ugly instead of begging for trench lawyers to help you not to create worthless gimmicks that serve no one.

When I explained to Clio’s Josh Lenon that the obvious problem with legal tech conferences is that no one there sees the trees, he responded that “It’s perfectly valid to view problems from forest-level as well as a per-tree basis.”  Yet another lie they tell themselves.  This group of wannabe lawtrepreneurs can’t see the trees or the forest. They suffer from the Squire of Gothos dilemma, the view of law in the trenches from their distant clouds.

When I consult with legal tech startups (yeah, the ones who actually want to succeed speak to real lawyers to find out whether their ugly baby can be made beautiful less ugly), there is invariably the same problem. Tech is created based on some outsider’s imagination of how law happens, which becomes real to them despite it being wholly disconnected from reality. If they prefer to argue that law should change how it does things to fit their gadget, they lose. If they grasp that their gadget has to provide value and benefit to law, they have half a chance.

Does legal tech, despite the greedy little fingers of its lying proponents, have the potential to contribute benefit to the A2J problem? Sure. Why not? But it will never accomplish anything until it deals with reality rather than the imaginary world of law as viewed through the warped eyes of its sycophants. Any benefit for A2J is collateral to the real interest of legal tech, which is to make oodles of money. And if you want serious lawyers to help you make a profit, then you have to pay them for their time, experience and knowledge. Just because your legal tech sucks doesn’t make you the A2J victim deserving our charity.

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14 thoughts on “Trees, Forests and Clouds: The A2J Fantasy”

  1. REvers

    An app that makes judges actually read your brief and listen to your argument before making a ruling would be a big seller. Are any of these people working on that?

  2. wilbur

    One problem with “delivering legal services” at no cost is that the recipient usually gets the quality he pays for,

      1. Patrick Maupin

        Slightly less simplistic?

        OK, how about the client usually doesn’t get what he doesn’t pay for?

        2. Jim Tyre

          One of Scott’s favorite cases is Brown v. Board of Education. The lawyers in that case (and many other landmark cases I could mention) charged their clients nothing.

          Though, one of the reasons why Scott likes Brown so much is that the SCOTUS Opinion was 14 pages. A model of brevity in comparison to the 100+page treatises that we see so often these days even from lower courts. But the SCOTUS Opinion was utterly devoid of any method of actually endind racial segreagation in schools, it just declared a grand principle. Perhaps if the plaintiffs had paid a lawyer, a more comprehensive result would have been reached. ‘-)

          1. SHG Post author

            Well, it’s not as if SCOTUS managed fully conceived solutions in their million page treatises argued by exceptionally well-paid lawyers either, so let’s not get crazy.

  3. Marc Whipple

    A simpler system for helping poor(er) people find lawyers who work inexpensively or pro bono in their fields would be of benefit to society. We used to just tell people “call the county bar association/local legal clinic/etc,” and hope for the best. At least, I did, because if there was anything better I didn’t know about it. (I am a corporate attorney and rarely go to court.)

    Oh, hello there, Avvo. Didn’t see you behind all your stupid ads and upscales. Welp, there’s that taken care of then. Stupid ads or not, it works just fine. What fields do you practice in, what are your rates, do you do pro bono? It’s all on there. Problem solved.

    It’s possible, I guess, that if legal tech could save attorneys who work with poor(er) people money they could afford to give away more time, but other than that, and the coordination problem, legal tech is not going to address A2J (what a precious acronym) issues. Because if some managing partner realizes that new tech has saved their firm the equivalent of two hours a month per associate, their reaction is NOT going to be, “Hey, now they can all do twenty-four hours of pro bono work a year and we’ll make the same money!” I absolutely guarantee it.

    And if they try to automate it/take the practice out of the expensive lawyer hands and put it in less expensive hands… LegalZoom is bad enough when it screws over a middle-class entrepreneur who can probably afford to fix what they break. Applying the same principles to people who have few or no resources is a much worse proposition.

    1. SHG Post author

      You seem to have leaped blindly into the “simpler solution” rabbit hole. You can get hurt that way. Bear in mind Mencken’s warning. This is a complex issue on many levels. There is no “simpler solution.” Not yours. Not theirs.

      1. Marc Whipple

        I didn’t mean that such a system would be a simple solution to the underlying overall problem, and if it seemed so, I apologize. I just meant that having a simple solution to that particular problem would be beneficial to society. It would be one less obstacle, and clearing obstacles is better than not clearing them. It would leave a whole lot of more imposing obstacles, I hasten to agree. There is no simple solution, or even a reasonably constrained group of solutions, to the general problem.

        1. SHG Post author

          Expressio unius est exclusio alterius. It would be best not to suggest there is a simple[r] solution if that’s not what you mean.

  4. maz

    “But that doesn’t mean that legal tech can’t do more, do better, to … enhance … the delivery of legal services.”

    Not to say you aren’t a special little snowflake, but your complaints echo those of almost any specialized population targeted by the tech industry for automated ‘assistance.’ Yours are just much better written. You even already know the solution to the problem, as well: Before putting pen to paper (or felt-tip pen to whiteboard, or fingertip to keyboard), find out from the prospective customer what it is *he* needs.

    The problem is getting the A2J providers to realize who the prospective customer actually is.

    It’s not a huge secret the legal system and the judicial profession both lag the enterprise in adoption of technology. In part, that’s because it’s “the legal system *and* the judicial profession” under discussion; one is intractably entwined with the other (and with law enforcement), and when people’s lives are at stake, you don’t necessarily want to be an early adopter. (Not to mention when you’re looking to spend public funds on something that doesn’t ultimately come from a defense contractor, the money isn’t always easy to come by.) Also in part it’s because the consumer of the product isn’t always the customer who pays the bill; the histories of Lexis, Lexitron, and PACER would undoubtedly be much different if not for billable T&M. But if even I can come away from a couple of stints of jury duty[1] with several pages of ideas for how the process could be improved,[2] imagine what someone who actually understood the process might do.

    Unfortunately, though, just when it came time for the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace to direct the Invisible Searchlight of Technological Munificence your way, we found ourselves in the era of the app. Suddenly, B2B is no longer as sexy as its B2C sibling: Rather than sell to #### customers for $$$$$ or ###### for ###, now one can sell to ######## for $ — or, even better, sell advertising on ######### apps given away for free. No matter if the C would be far better served — as is usually the case — by helping the B to operate more efficiently or with fewer errors, the thought of $######## out there, waiting to be had, is hard to ignore.

    So the quest becomes finding some way to provide some sort of benefit to C while bypassing B. In a commodity market, that’s fine, if somewhat disconcerting, but the upside to C outweighs the potential downside. (Similarly, I have no doubt automobile engines seize up for lack of oil at a much greater rate than before the introduction of self-serve gasoline.) In a market requiring specialized knowledge or information, though, the risks are much higher — which is why the late 1990s saw a huge increase in the number of day-traders, most of whom went on to lose their shirts, and why today we have so many people suffering from Morgellon’s or gluten sensitivity.

    This isn’t to say there’s never any benefit to be gained from B2C, even in a specialized environment: I suspect for every 5 or 10 imaginary gluten allergies there’s probably an otherwise undiagnosed heart attack or (in my case) torn retina caught early on. (For that matter, I handled the first 95% of my last divorce in pro per with Internet access and a set of downloadable forms. But I’m smarter than most people, never would have attempted it if my ex’s attorney hadn’t so obviously been a blithering idiot, *and* still hired someone to bat clean-up.) The problem is that those applications — speaking non-cybernetically — providing the greatest good while risking the least harm tend to be narrow and limited: think “online drug interaction calculator.” Certainly, in no way would they merit a full-blown media push — let alone Stanford-hosted symposia or $$$$$$$s in VC dollars.

    And, inevitably, in 5 or 10 years’ time, when the first truly beneficial A2J offerings appear, they’ll turn out to have been created in-house by some cash-strapped PD office or legal aid society before being discovered and ‘productized’ by some second-generation player in the A2J arena.
    __________
    1. As one might imagine, self-employed, middle-aged white [or somewhat off-white] guys are much desired on San Francisco juries. I died my white hair teal for my most recent call-up and still got seated as an alternate.

    2. Starting with classes on effective Power-Point use for Boalt students interning with the PD.

    1. SHG Post author

      There are many levels beneath the surface, where serious discussions of legal tech could happen, with regard to distinguishing the bits of law that can and should be commoditized (there are, of course) from those that can’t be. There are many levels of people in legitimate need of A2J help, sometimes because of the nature of their legal need, others because of the reality of their financial need (not all people who complain about legal costs are legit). There are consumers capable of handling their own commoditized work (or even harder work) and those who will blow it completely. And there are “bespoke” lawyers who are so incompetent that they make fill-in-the-blank forms look brilliant.

      Law encompasses a huge and varied enterprise. It doesn’t sell a product. It isn’t even clear much of the time whether the services provided are any good. And almost every good that can be developed has the potential for disaster as well. And then, there is one final question nobody wants to talk about. If tech undermines the financial structure of law, lawyers won’t make enough money to survive and people (first smart, then anyone) will stop being lawyers, and certainly won’t develop into good, then great, lawyers. Then, all that’s left is apps.

      I’ll be dead by then.

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