Research article
Education for the provision of technologically enhanced legal services

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2020.105519Get rights and content

Abstract

Legal professionals increasingly rely on digital technologies when they provide legal services. The most advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) promise great advancements of legal services, but lawyers are traditionally not educated in the field of digital technology and thus cannot fully unlock the potential of such technologies in their practice. In this paper, we identify five distinct skills and knowledge gaps that prevent lawyers from implementing AI and digital technology in the provision of legal services and suggest concrete models for education and training in this area. Our findings and recommendations are based on a series of semi-structured interviews, design and delivery of an experimental course in ‘Law and Computer Science’, and an analysis of the empirical data in view of wider debates in the literature concerning legal education and 21st century skills.

Introduction

The impacts of digital innovation and artificial intelligence (AI) on skills needs are being studied in many sectors and occupations across the developed world,1 and alongside international overviews, there are also attempts to contextualise emerging skills needs within national institutional and policy frameworks.2 This article addresses these issues in the context of English legal profession as it is now inevitable that legal services will be transformed by the increasing use of digital technology and AI. Already there are legal startups which provide automated services in place of those traditionally offered in person at a greatly reduced cost and even traditional law firms increasingly rely on digital research and knowledge management tools. This has been highlighted due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic which has forced most businesses and legal service providers to quickly adopt remote and digital working practices—some of which practices are becoming the new normal. But regardless of the pandemic, legal professionals work with large numbers of textual documents and they need thus to record, transmit and process information on a vast scale. In this regard, the promises of digital technology and AI are evident—they can automate many tasks and processes in relation to which humans are woefully inefficient. Take, for example, a simple ‘Ctrl+F’ shortcut that saves many lawyers hours of work each day. These technologies can also facilitate entirely new types of legal services. Think of powerful AI-driven tools that some professionals already use in order to extract intelligence from documents reviewed as part of due diligence.

Currently, however, it seems that the adoption of the most advanced lawtech is still relatively low.3 Our hypothesis is that this is partly due to various skills and knowledge gaps amongst legal service providers, which gaps prevent lawyers from unlocking the full potential of AI and digital technology for the provision of their services. While latest scholarship already highlights the need for introducing lawtech in the undergraduate LLB curricula,4 it remains unclear what particular knowledge and skills future lawyers will need in order to deploy digital technologies to theirs and their clients’ advantage. It is also unclear whether these needs are part of a broader shift towards 21st century skills or are domain specific. We seek to fill this gap.

This paper identifies the skills and knowledge gaps that prevent lawyers from implementing AI and digital technology in the provision of legal services and suggests concrete models for education and training in this area, that is education for the provision of tech-enhanced legal services. Our findings and recommendations are based on a combination of empirical and theoretical research methodologies thanks to which we identify the learning needs and propose how future and established lawyers should be educated so that they can provide technologically enhanced legal services. In particular, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with law professionals, designed and delivered an experimental course in ‘Law and Computer Science’, and analysed the empirical data in view of wider debates in the literature concerning legal education and 21st century skills more generally.

By tech-enhanced legal services we mean tech-enabled or tech-powered services which a client would arguably prefer to services that can be provided independently of such digital technology. Lawyers have a duty to prioritise their client's interests and it is thus plausible to assume that lawyers intend to improve their services primarily because they want better to serve their clients. The tech-enhancement could result in a better price or a superior quality of legal services. It may also lead to tech-enabled services that were not available to the client previously. Of course, much can be said about the potential of AI and digital technology to worsen outcomes for certain groups, but it is evident that there are at least some respects in which such enhancements can work to the benefit of both the law firms and their clients and it is the education necessary to inform the development of such technology with which we are concerned here.

It is also worth noting that AI and digital technology is likely to impact upon law in two different ways; by affecting legal practice in the ways outlined above, and by presenting challenges to particular areas of law such as employment law, private law liability, competition law and so on. While our research more generally covers both these spheres, this paper is concerned only with the first, or what might be described as the impact of AI and digital technology on ‘the process of lawyering’. The skills we identify are not irrelevant even for those who continue in standard legal practice, but for those who wish to augment or automate legal practice in the manner outlined above, they are crucial.

The motivation for this paper is the existing potential for wider deployment of AI and digital technology that would enhance legal services. We focus on the English legal sector because innovative English lawyers are well-positioned to compete for clientele both nationally, thanks to a relatively liberal regulatory landscape, and globally, thanks to the unique combination of this landscape and the strong reputation of the English common law. Besides, a recent report from the European Commission's JRC shows that the UK stands out as a leader in the number of academic programmes in AI domain.5 Arguably, there is a great promise for the English legal sector if it can attract the right talent and if lawyers are adequately prepared to work with computer scientists in order to provide tech-enhanced legal services.

The paper is structured as follows. First, we explain our research methods (Section 2). Then we provide some background information that will help the reader to contextualise the learning needs presented in this paper (Section 3). Subsequently, in Section 4, we turn to the gist of our work and discuss the particular learning needs by first addressing some big questions emerging in this field, then by looking at what we propose to be the common core of knowledge and skills that seem to be necessary for the design and delivery of tech-enhanced legal services, then by examining some specific skills and knowledge needs in view of continuous education and training, and finally by discussing a broader trend in the 21st century skills. In Section 5 we outline how these learning needs could be met. Section 6 summarises our main findings.

Section snippets

Research methods

This paper results from a large-scale multidisciplinary project titled ‘Unlocking the Potential of Artificial Intelligence for English Law’ and builds on and complements some of the project's other results. In particular, the paper builds on a literature review concerning education and training for tech-enhanced professional services and legal services in particular.6 Further, it is positioned in the context of our review

Contextual information

According to the Oxford LawTech Survey, 90 per cent of English solicitors indicated that they would need some training concerning AI and digital technology in the next three years.10 Almost as many respondents stated they would welcome the opportunity better to understand the application of technology to the practice of law by taking a course.11 More than 60 per cent of them agreed or strongly agreed that lawyers need to become familiar with multiple

Results and discussion: What are the learning needs?

Against this background, let us first address some of the ‘big’ questions discussed in relation to lawtech education. Do lawyers need to code? The programming skills—colloquially referred to as coding—were discussed by most of our interviewees and their responses unanimously suggest that the lawyers do not need to code. As one of them put it, lawyers ‘just need to understand how it works, not necessarily how to do it’.23 Another concurred that ‘a basic technological

Recommendations: How to meet those needs?

It is one thing to identify the learning needs and another thing entirely to find ways to satisfy those needs. There is a large body of literature dealing with education and educational methods generally68 as well as in law,69 all of which can be

Conclusions

Our research seems to confirm the hypothesis that the provision of tech-enhanced legal services is partly limited by skills and knowledge gaps amongst legal service providers. What kind of education will thus help lawyers to provide tech-enhanced legal services?

This paper argued that a common core of lawtech skills and knowledge is particularly important for the development and provision of tech-enhanced legal services. In particular, five areas of learning need emerged from our research: 1)

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund: ‘Next Generation Services’. An early version of this paper was presented as part of a keynote talk at The Future of Legal Education and Training Conference 2020, organised by Legal Cheek, and the Future of LawTech Education (WP5) workshop organised by the University of Oxford as part of the AI4Law Workshop Series. We would like to thank all our interviewees and the inaugural ‘Law and

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