A Decade of Change

Now that the “Roaring 20s v 2.0” is coming to a close, I thought I’d look back over the past decade to see how far we’ve come in 10 years. Despite starting off the decade with a Worldwide Pandemic, the threats to the rule of law, push back on recognition of racial inequality and then the brief hiccup of the Great Robot War of 2026*, we’ve made some really great positive strides.

*Self driving cars became momentarily sentient and killed some people, but we patched the bug and its fine now, no worries.

Most people know about the asteroid that caused the mass extinction event 66 million years ago and think about it mainly in terms of “dinosaurs went extinct.” However, many other organisms better adapted to the new environment thrived. So was the case in the 2020s legal world. Suprisingly, perhaps due to the massive and inexacapable nature of the disruptions in the early part of the decade, change became much more distributed and not just located in certain sectors of the legal world.

(As a side note, isn’t it great that we stopped separating out “legal tech” and “legal innovation” as separate categories and embraced the fact that they are necessary components to all of the participants in the legal world?)

So, here are my top positive developments in the legal world in the past decade (in no particular order):

1) Embracing Open Community Developed Content and Containers

In times of crisis, communities can either choose a panicked “every man for himself” ethos or choose to work together and survive as a group. After the turmoil at the beginning of the decade, legal communities banded together to share content and fund and support community developed software. This had already begun to be a practice in the “access to justice” space, but these folks moved the ball forward even more by formalizing the practice through development of standards and creating a consortium to develop, maintain and deploy open source software. They’ve also created a shared library of openly licensed form templates, flow charts and explainers for clients that can be adapted for each jurisdiction’s needs.

2) Recognition of Inequalities in Tools and Processes

Again, as with so many things, racial inequality was a known issue for many, especially for those that had to live with it in their personal as well as professional life. The events early part of the decade made the realization of the race based inequalities in the legal system and technology unavoidable for many more people who had been able to exist without considering it. As of this writing, we’re still working on decoupling 400 plus years of racial inequality that has been baked into government functions and society, but it’s getting better. This has been helped by increased use of community developed software and tools that allow for more voices to be involved in creation and review of these tools.

3) Legal Service Delivery Decoupled from Place and Status

The pandemic at the beginning of the decade forced people away from centralized, in person legal services delivery, be it at courts or law firms or clinics or what have you. This had quite a few effects:

1. Lawyers that provide services directly to clients at all economic levels had to improve their “digital office” and create and utilize better webpages, portals and online service options such as “create a simple will” or “execute basic contract.” Lawyers that did this quickly and well were able to realize better profits and were able to provide services to more clients.

2. Courts likewise had to improve their online presence and service options. For courts this was slightly more tricky as they were initially locked into only a handful of vendors who simply didn’t provide adequate tools. However, after the National State Court Technology Summit held in late 2021, working groups were formed to create new procurement processes and needed features lists that could be shared across jurisdictions. As with legal service providers, courts also worked together to create, sustain and implement open tools and technologies that lifted all jurisdictions regardless of budget constraints.

3. Once in person services resumed, there was greater effort made to decentralize and meet people where they were, especially if serving a client base without access or comfort in using online services. Much more effort has been made to partner with organizations and entities already physically in communities to make legal services more accessible to people that thought legal assistance was out of reach.

4. Community based legal services delivery and online service delivery brought to light the fact that many legal services do not require a degreed and licensed lawyer to deliver. With proper training (and in some case licensing), were seeing that many more individuals can be utilized in delivery legal services.

4) No More Expectation of Pantyhose in Summer Months

Listen, pantyhose doesn’t exist anymore. It’s too complicated to go into why. Just rejoice in bare legged freedom in 104 degree weather.

5) Holistic Reform of Legal Training, Assessment and Continuing Education

While it was always true that bar exams did not adequately assess lawyer competency and enforced inequalities, the continued insistence of some jurisdictions to hold a high stakes exam in person in the middle of a pandemic revealed the ridiculousness of it all. The conversation of how to train and test lawyers was already in progress at this time but it was accelerated and brought into mainstream by the events of the beginning of decade.

The work continues, but everything from new pipeline programs developed to bring under-represented populations into the legal profession to removing requirements of standardized tests in admissions to new curriculum paths and teaching methods (how did the case law method last for 100 years after the death of Langdell?) to universal extension of diploma privilege coupled with more intensive and supervised continuing education has been brought into play.

Progress Made, But The Work Continues

While things are far from perfect, I think we can agree that things have progressed for the better in the past decade. Sometimes there just needs to be a shock to the system to finally make people consider changing from their path.

(Images from Public Domain Review)