Featured

The Future is Now

It’s a bright sunny day, and you’re riding your bicycle down the street, you turn a corner and bang! You just ran into the back of a car. Unable to walk, an ambulance takes you to the hospital, where you spend the next two weeks recovering.

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This is the first time anything like this has happened to you, so from a legal standpoint, you’re unsure what to do. You immediately remember your friend Jackie was in a minor car crash and posted something about a lawyer on Facebook. So, you pull out your phone to see exactly what it was. She said, ‘totally recommend The Accident Lawyers, they are so technologically advanced”. Below the post was other people confirming this, liking and sharing her comment. They must be good, you thought! You go to their website, only to find they are located over a 1000 km’s away, but you send them an inquiry email anyway.

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The response is instant, and you receive a basic game where you input information. You play the game which basically explains what happened to you in your accident and send it back. They are happy to take on your case, but you are still unsure as they are so far away. To reassure you, they organise someone to drop a virtual reality headset off at the hospital. You plug it in and you’re immediately in a virtual office having a meeting with the lawyer taking your case. They answer all your questions on a personal level and assure everything will be taken care of.

This may seem like the future, however, in this blog I will explain how this is law in digital media today.

Participatory Culture

We now live in a world where people do not just watch the news, but they look to the internet and sharing platforms to get their information. People can use their phone to access sites like Facebook, look at a company’s review, check the comments, ask questions, gather information and finally write their own review.

According to Jenkins, Ito & Boyd (2016), with the emergence of new digital and mobile technologies, a higher level of participatory culture has emerged. This has resulted in a boundless network of information, with the potential to reach further than any news site or advertisement. In conjunction with interactivity, which is a back and forth interaction between users through technology (Bucy & Tao, 2007), the internet has evolved into a highly collaborative intelligence.

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This has both positive and negative effects when related to law. It opens an area of uneducated citizen journalists de-professionalising the law due to their insufficient background and knowledge. Alternatively, when used correctly, the interconnectivity and intercreativity of digital media allows users to converge on an area of law, leading them to a credible source.

Networks & Collective Intelligence

As technologies progress, the ability to share information faster and with more people becomes possible, ultimately breaking down barriers. According to McLuhan (2013), the evolution of electronic communication will result in a boundless global village, an idea he first published in 1964. A similar idea is, electronic communication will converge human experience everywhere, binding the world into a new form of community (Boorstin, 1978). With current digital technology, we are now well on track with these theories.


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According to Castells (2000), the new social society is made up of many networks within the internet. These networks can start off small, constantly gaining users through the “bandwagon effect” and ultimately become very large and powerful like Facebook or Wikipedia. By being part of these networks, people are adding to the collective intelligence within them. According to Levy (1997), collective intelligence will enhance human knowledge, facilitating interaction, promoting participation and ultimately allow large databases.

With time and distance no longer an issue on platforms like Facebook, new communities are being formed.  They give the user a sense of membership, influence, fulfilment and shared emotional connection. According to Oldenburg, and Brissett (1982), this can be defined as a “third place’, somewhere outside home or work, that gives the user wholeness.

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It is very common for people to look at Facebook to gain information, as they look to their ‘friends’ for advice or help.  This can be extremely helpful if you are a law firm trying to gain traction in an already established market. High advertising costs can be avoided by using networks to share your information far and wide. Additionally, a network of legal information is available to everyone with access to the internet. It can be shared within and between networks to help educate people that would not normally be exposed to such material.

Gamification & Virtuality

Many subjects, including law, can be complex, hard to understand and just plain boring. Gamification, augmented reality and virtual reality within these subjects is becoming increasingly prevalent. According to Interaction Design Foundation (2019), gamification incorporates game-like features into a non-game application to make them more engaging. If done correctly, it can make the most mundane task volunteer worthy. By incorporating this into law, people might want to learn the law and find it interesting and fun. Additionally, when incorporated into tasks like filling out multiple page forms, clients can complete the process feeling like they achieved something, ‘not just another form’.

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Augmented reality is not very common within law. However, virtual reality is becoming more common within the business side of law. According to Jackson (2019), virtual reality is an immersive computer-controlled environment, where augmented reality is like VR with one foot out the door.

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So why would law firms use VR? With distance and time restricting the information we share, VR holds the answer to interactive experiences. Law firms can conduct meetings within VR, giving both users a fully immersive experience and a strong sense of presence. According to Lombard, and Ditton (1997), there are six concepts of presence. Social richness, realism, transportation, immersion, a social actor with a medium and a medium as a social actor. VR can achieve many of these concepts very easily.

Security

There is more content on the internet now, than ever before. This opens up many security issues as personal information is now a commodity. According to The Economist (2014), engines like google have been tailoring ads to users for years. These tailored ads come from personal information that is left behind in your digital footprint or stolen from platforms like Facebook. According to the Economist (2014), data breaches stealing personal details are becoming more common.

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For law firms to operate fully digital, it leaves them vulnerable to hacking personal and sensitive big data. However, the risk can be mitigated through educating employees, monitoring networks, and only running approved software (The Economist, 2014).

Digital Divide

Internet access is now an essential part of human life. The digital divide is often thought of as the inequalities and divisions of information within a networked society (Norris, 2001).

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Australia and specifically Queensland rank high regarding digital inclusion. According to Telstra (2019), the capital to country gap is the lowest of all Australian states. This is important, as it allows users in remote areas the opportunity to be part of the growing network of communities we have on the internet. Ultimately allowing users to access information, lawyers and legal help. As Australia moves into the future, hopefully, the digital gap can be narrowed, and policy can be created to help users to share information that everyone has a right to use.

References

  • Boorstin, D. (1978). Republic of technology: reflections on our future community. United States: Harper and Row Publishers Inc. (New York, NY)
  • Bucy, E., & Tao, C. (2007, May). The Mediated Moderation Model of Interactivity. Media Psychology, 9(3), 647–672.
  • Castells, M. (2000, September). Toward a Sociology of the Network Society. Contemporary Sociology, 29(5), 693–699.
  • Jenkins, H., Itō, M., & Boyd, D. (2016). Participatory culture in a networked era: a conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
  • Lévy, P. (1997). Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace. Cambridge: Perseus Books. (Cambridge, MA)
  • Lombard, M., & Ditton, T. (1997, September). At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 3(2).
  • McLuhan, M. (2013). Understanding media the extensions of man. New York: Gingko Press. (New York, NY)
  • Norris, P. (2001). Digital divide: Civic engagement, information poverty, and the Internet worldwide. Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press.
  • Oldenburg, R., & Brissett, D. (1982). The third place. Qualitative Sociology, 5(4), 265–284.

Featured

Digital Law

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I recently visited the chambers of a Queen’s Counsel Barrister in Brisbane. It was a large office, and every wall was lined with books, to the point you could call it a small library. The barrister himself was in his 60’s, and he had a lifetime of experience and knowledge. My thought was, this is more information than most people would experience in 10 lifetimes all in one room. Surely there is a better way of sharing that information, with clients and fellow legal practitioners.

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Law has already started to turn digital, and as we move further into the digital age, we must ask, how far is too far when it comes to digital law. At one end of the scale, we have books and cases about the law being uploaded into digital form. This makes it much easier for lawyers and legal practitioners to search and access the data. On the other side, companies and governments are using this information and developing algorithms in order to give out legal advice and autonomise the legal decision-making processes. There are many dilemmas that arise between these two points. So, what is the correct amount of digital law?

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To get an understanding of what the correct amount of digital law should be, we must first look at how and why the transfer to digital law started. Law first started its digital move by transferring from physical books to a digital form of information. There was too much legal information available in physical form, and legal practitioners found it time-consuming trying to access this information. This resulted in senior lawyers and barristers holding the most valuable information. These senior legal practitioners could only teach a certain amount of people at a single time, resulting in a restricted flow of information. In other words, the information was there, but the capacity to share it openly was not.

This started to change when computers and the internet came along. On August 6th, 1991, the web went public (The Economist, 2014). This opened up a world of information sharing, that would ultimately make it easier for legal practitioners to access hard to find information.

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The emergence of computers and the internet coincided with the world moving into the digital era. According to Rabie (2013), there are four stages of human development regarding communication. They are hunter-gatherer, agricultural, industrial and information age. The industrial age represents the printing press and books, and the Information age represents computers and moving forward into the digital era. The movement between these eras is a result of convergence. But what is convergence?

According to Jenkins (2016), convergence is:

The flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want (p.2).

Basically, lawyers, libraries, courts and the government started sharing their legal information. Most likely not because they wanted to, but because lawyers, barristers, students, the media and the general public went searching for the information. This, in turn, drove the change to make the information more readily available to everyone, in order to have a more transparent Judicial system.

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So where are we now in relation to digital law? According to Schartum (2016), we already have digitised legislation that is contained within algorithms. These are mainly found within government administration, relating to taxes, pensions and welfare schemes. These algorithms and parts of the system development involve a process of embedded legal decision making that may be seen as hidden, and that goes on behind closed doors. If an outsider was to question the reasons behind a legal decision, it would simply not be possible. In contrast this is the opposite of the rule of law that we currently have. According to The Australian Government (2019), all legislation and case must be law clear, predictable and accessible in order to make our legislative, executive and judicial systems as transparent as possible.

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It could be argued that the move towards allowing algorithms to make legal decisions is a result of technological determinism. According to de la Cruz Paragas and Lin (2014), technological determinism is the link between the communication technology of an era and the key features within a society. But is it good or bad? Some people are technophobes, which means they have a fear of technology as they believe technology is the driving force behind the change. Others believe in technophilia, which means they like technology and think people drive change as they have control over the technology they use. I think we lie somewhere in the middle, in what is called socio-culturalists, a form of technological determinism. According to Chandler (1996), this is where people believe present technologies are subordinate to particular social and cultural context. So basically, technology is not driving us to make algorithms to decide legal decisions for us. With a growing population, we as a society want systems that will free up humans to do less manual work and be able to make more important decisions. This means we have no other choice than to develop an algorithm-based computer system to assist us. Technology didn’t make this decision for us, we made it, and we happen to be in the information age, where the available technology makes it possible.

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Unfortunately, some legal professionals do not share this opinion and do not support the move to digital law. According to Doraisamy (2019), we have already reached a point where barristers must now embrace digital law or be left behind. Ageing barristers believe they are too old to transfer to digital law. However, if they do not, they will find their final years in law extremely challenging. Contrastingly, I believe there is a perfect opportunity for digital law to help people in rural areas. According to The Law Society (2016), there are 10922 lawyers in Queensland, but only 16% of those work in rural areas. This means many people in country towns do not have access to lawyers when they need them. A digital law system based on algorithms would be the perfect solution to this problem.

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Algorithm-based law is an example of the diffusion of innovations. According to Rogers (2003), diffusion of innovations explains the spread of new ideas through a social system by communication. There are four main elements of diffusion, they are, the innovation, communication channels, time and social systems. These elements relate to digital law algorithms in every way. The innovation was to start using algorithms in the first place, in order to reduce workload on legal practitioners. As business’ start to adopt this practice the question is, will it advance enough to gain critical mass in order to pass the innovators dilemma? This is the tipping point for innovations, which if they pass, they will usually succeed in market dominance. I believe digital law is almost at this point, but to succeed it is now dependent on the communication channels used to promote it, time and the social situation to except the idea.

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Due to technoculture, we now live in a global network of knowledge workers where information is neither good nor bad but is related to the context of how we use it. According to Berrey (1999), knowledge workers are extremely competent when it come to cyber-foraging. However, according to Beaton (2017), knowledge workers are bad at making decisions, because we have too much information that is not organised. Therefore, as I move into my future career as a legal professional, I believe a digital law system that is built around algorithms will most definitely help. As more innovations are built on top of this algorithm-based law, each new innovation will have more labour built into it than its predecessor, accelerating change, capitalising on knowledge and ultimately advancing the legal digital sphere.

References

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