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    Cyborg Lawyers
    Cyborg Lawyers
    Cyborg Lawyers
    Ebook157 pages2 hours

    Cyborg Lawyers

    By Kevin Rhodes

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    About this ebook

    This second collection of Kevin’s blog posts for The Now of Law and the Colorado Bar Association’s Legal Connection ezine focuses on the future and culture of law. Drawing from a variety of disciplines and perspectives --including science, technology, neuro-culture, positive psychology, and entrepreneurship-- it sweeps through current hot topics such as globalization, commoditization, democratization, big data, artificial intelligence, online algorithms, disruptive technology, the new economy, hacking, mindfulness, and more. Extensively researched, visionary, futuristic, and written in a crisp, conversational style by a man on a mission to bring professional excellence and personal wellbeing to the people who learn, teach, and practice the law.

    The Future of Law collection boldly predicts the future of law practice, lawyers, and the law itself, which Kevin summarizes as follows:

    The new practice models and technologies we’re already seeing won’t merely change how law is practiced, but will re-create lawyers themselves -- who they are, and what they do.

    As a result, a new kind of lawyer will in a new kind of law practice, alongside a new kind of legal expert who wouldn’t even qualify to be called a lawyer in today’s regulatory environment.

    Alongside both of them, consumers (no longer “clients”) will themselves also practice law in a wave of legal DIY aided by artificial intelligence algorithms engineered by cyber geeks and served up online.

    The combined impetus of these developments will create a new kind of law-- new in both substantive content and in how it is created, shaped, communicated, and applied.

    In particular, this new kind of law will be created and disseminated, and will grow and change, by processes other than the historical reliance on legislation and appellate precedent and lawyer-to-client communication.

    Finally, the advent of this new kind of law will transform the law’s role as a foundational institution in the larger cultural context in which it lives and moves and has its being.

    The Culture of Law section explores the author’s belief that, in order for the new legal entrepreneurial practice models and technologies to sustain themselves, a new culture for the legal profession will need to arise with them. Kevin follows his interest in neuroscience to examine how culture is formed from the inside out -- beginning literally with how lawyers’ brains are re-wired in law school and upon entry into legal practice. This examination leads to this far-reaching conclusion:

    “The practice models and cultural dynamics that make up the legal profession’s status quo today simply will not be with us in 50 years. Some won’t be here in 20, maybe not in 5 or 10. Some are gone already. As they disappear -- one by one, and in batches -- a new world of law will emerge to replace them. And when it does, the law’s role in human society -- and thus human society itself -- will have changed with it.”

    The Legal Times ends by challenging “those of us who inhabit the legal profession, who consider it an essential milieu of our work and our lives” to lend a hand in creating the law’s new future and culture. “The question is not whether the new future and culture of law will arrive, it is whether we’ll lend a hand in bringing it about.”

    Drawing on insights gathered from science, technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, neuroscience, psychology, and from his personal experiences as a practicing lawyer, The Legal Times is extensively researched, visionary, and written in a crisp, conversational style by a man on a mission to bring wellbeing to the people who learn, teach, and practice the law.

    Although focused on the legal profession, this book’s lessons are widely applicable to a multitude of other arenas experiencing radical transformation in our world today.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKevin Rhodes
    Release dateJan 7, 2016
    ISBN9781310418556
    Cyborg Lawyers
    Author

    Kevin Rhodes

    Kevin Rhodes works out, writes articles and books, paints abstract art, and cooks dinner.

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      Book preview

      Cyborg Lawyers - Kevin Rhodes

      My book Law, Enlightenment, and Other States of Mind collected several years of my blog posts for the Colorado Bar Association’s Legal Connection ezine. It ended with a series called Killing Them Softly, featuring the work of University of Denver Law professor Debra S. Austin. Killing Them Softly: Neuroscience Reveals How Brain Cells Die From Law School Stress And How Neural Self-Hacking Can Optimize Cognitive Performance, 59 Loy. L. Rev. 791 (2013).

      Research studies and media stories about lawyer depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide are legion, but Prof. Austin’s Killing Them Softly sounded a new kind of alarm through its application of neuroscience to the chronic stresses of law school and legal practice and its depiction of how law students and lawyers suffer cognitive brain damage that impairs them from doing precisely what their studies and practices require.

      How’s that working for you, if you’re a client? Or an educator? Or a spouse? Or any number of other people with vested interests in law student and lawyer health and performance?

      The more I blogged about Killing Them Softly, the more I wondered: if we know we’re hurting ourselves, then why don’t we stop it? I’d blogged about that before; the legal world’s confounding indifference to its own welfare is an inescapable question for anyone who writes about lawyer career and personal satisfaction. This time, I broached the topic in a short series called Saving Ourselves From Ourselves, using Star Trek’s bad guys The Borg to lighten the inquiry. I mean, it was the end of the year (2014) and holiday time, after all. My attempt at levity didn’t help. Not really. The topic was too disturbing and the Borg you will be assimilated metaphor too appropriate. The law profession’s entrenched willingness to tolerate and continue its unhealthy and performance-impairing practices wasn’t going away that easily.

      Meanwhile, I’d noticed that an emerging subset of the legal profession seemed to be having a more upbeat experience. These were the new legal entrepreneurs, who seemed to have cornered the market on inspired action and were busy creating a bold new future for law practice. And yet, from what I could tell, the mainstream of lawyers remained unaware of the seismic shift in the legal profession happening right under their feet. They simply didn’t have ears to hear or eyes to see; they didn’t and apparently couldn’t feel the tremors. Once again I wondered: Why not?

      I had written about trends in law practice before as well, but armed with new research, I launched a new series at the start of the new year (2015) on The Future of Law. And then, for some reason I couldn’t articulate then and still can’t, I decided to play like a futurist and predict where the future of law was going. The predictions flowed easily once I focused on the larger trends driving the entrepreneurial initiatives, such as globalization, commoditization, democratization, and big data. Those trends were mostly finding expression in new legal practice models and technologies, and in hindsight my predictions in that arena frankly weren’t all that remarkable, although they certainly seemed so to me when I wrote them.

      No surprise, then, that one week I would predict something, only to discover within short order an example of it. No, I hadn’t developed a new gift of clairvoyance, I was only tapping into what was already happening. In fact, I was fast being left behind: not only were the legal entrepreneurs busy creating a new future for law practice, but both legal and popular media were equally busy covering it. I had just come late to the party.

      I helped myself liberally to the news as I wrote my blog, but then a more stunning realization about the future of law began to dawn in my awareness. This realization came to me in a series of waves, each amplifying the others:

      The new practice models and technologies wouldn’t only change how law is practiced, they would invariably re-create lawyers themselves -- who they are, and what they do.

      As a result, a new kind of lawyer would engage in a new kind of law practice, alongside a new kind of legal expert who wouldn’t even qualify to be called a lawyer in today’s regulatory environment.

      Alongside both of them, consumers (no longer clients) would themselves also practice law in a wave of legal DIY aided by artificial intelligence algorithms engineered by cyber geeks and served up online.

      The combined impetus of all these developments would create a new kind of law-- new in both substantive content and in how it is created, shaped, communicated, and applied.

      In particular, this new kind of law would be created and disseminated, and would grow and change, by processes other than the historical reliance on legislation and appellate precedent and in-person lawyer-to-client communication.

      Finally, the advent of a new kind of law would transform the law’s role as a foundational institution in the larger cultural context.

      Seismic change, indeed.

      Having followed new practice models and technologies all the way to a new role for the law in human culture, I stumbled across one more stunning realization: in order for the legal entrepreneurial practice models and technologies to sustain themselves within a context still recognizable as what we consider to be the legal profession today, a new law culture would need to arise with them. Without a new law culture, the new law would be patched onto the old version of the legal profession and the garment would tear, leaving what was left of the profession to degenerate into non-visionary squabbling over long-debated issues like non-lawyer ownership of legal services and multi-jurisdictional legal entities. The big picture would be lost in a myopic preoccupation with making new developments fit existing paradigms. Meanwhile the larger legal paradigm would keep shifting, resulting in a haphazard and messy arrival.

      That realization led to a follow up series on The Culture of Law, which occupied the second half of 2015. Following Prof. Austin’s lead and my personal interest in neuroscience, I examined how culture is formed from the inside out -- beginning literally with how lawyers’ brains are wired in law school and upon entry into legal practice. Among other things, I learned that culture (including the law profession’s culture) is formed in individual brains, then transmitted from one brain to another in the form of cultural agreements the culture’s members make about what is real and appropriate. I also learned that culture is changed the same way: it begins with individuals thinking differently and expands from there until the Tipping Point is reached and the collective brains of the culture find themselves wondering how it is that the old culture seems so entirely gone and the new one so entirely present. When that day comes, the New Normal will be the only normal some people in the law culture have ever known. Pause for a moment and try to get your head around what that would be like, if that were true of you.

      Which brings us back to the question I asked above: Why this collection?

      The original cover and title of this volume mimicled Bob Dylan’s seminal 60’s album and its anthem The Times They Are A-Changin’. Referencing Dylan and the 60’s was not a me-too grab for social revolutionary status, it was a recognition of the social revolution that is already upon us. Something much, much bigger than new practice technologies and non-lawyer ownership of legal service providers is shaking underfoot. The practice models and cultural dynamics that make up the legal profession’s status quo today simply will not be with us in 50 years. Some won’t be here in 20, maybe not in 5 or 10. Some are gone already. As they disappear -- one by one, and in batches -- a new world of law will emerge to replace them. And when it does, the law’s role in human society -- and thus human society itself -- will have changed with it. All of that will happen though a process that is evolutionary, inevitable, and already well underway -- begun, literally, in the re-wiring of law student and lawyer brains.

      In the midst of all of this seismic change, there is yet one essential element waiting to fully play its hand: us -- that is, those of us who inhabit the legal profession, who consider it an essential milieu of our work and our lives, and who care enough to lend a hand in creating its new future and culture, which wait for our participation to bring them fully into existence. The question is not whether the

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