Let’s Revisit: LegalTech Ethics

Hello friends in the computer,

I’ve been blogging about professional issues under my real name since fall 2007. (I remember decided to try it while walking around Toronto during the Libraries Without Borders conference.) And while there were many reasons I stopped/slowed, a big part of that was (1) my archives felt like an albatross of cringe (2) I don’t like to repeat myself and I feel like I said everything I had to say.

(As an aside, absolute shout out to Kevin O’Keefe who has managed to stay on message and yet incorporate new developments into his long term thesis of “you should blog” for decades. I don’t know how he does it.)

When I rebooted my website, I made all the old posts private just to start fresh. But I thought that instead of hiding and running from my past totally, it’d be fun to review and go back to the archives and see how those hot takes changed. There’s some real dog shit in there, but if I may quote icon Drag Queen Katya…

So, I’ve been trying to keep up with the dueling conversations around Do Not Pay and Chat GPT, specifically using the latter in legal tech. I won’t link to it since it’s been partially retracted, but there was a bit of a dust up between two tech creators and one implied the other was behaving in an unethical manner.

Legal Tech Ethics?

I’ve written about that!

And actually the blog post was a write up of a keynote that I gave on the topic.

And when I was digging out the legal tech ethics blog post, I discovered that apparently I have also already written about Do Not Pay.

(Currently the theme I’m using doesn’t seem to show post dates but the Ethics post was written in April of 2018 and the DNP one was in October 2018.)

So let’s get into it…

Actually let’s start with the Do Not Pay one. I tell you what, the sigh of relief I let out when I saw Past Sarah write right from jump “cautiously optimistic.” I seemed to see immediate problems with maintaining currency with all US jurisdictional requirements, scared as Hell by the immigration promises, and a little concerned that this piece of A2J tech (whether or not you want to call it legal tech) was not being developed with an appropriate amount of care. VERDICT: NAILED IT.

The Legal Tech Ethics one isn’t as easy to rate because Holy Christ that was long. I was very depressed at that point in time but man that is borderline hypomanic content.

Anyway…

I still would like to see a community created code of ethics for the creation and deployment of legal tech. I’m not sure any existing org is appropriate to host it yet. (I am a proud ABA member and volunteer [check out the new Midterm Innovation report and see if you can guess my contributions!] but the ABA is the opposite of the right place to make this.) I think the best option would be for a group of like minded community members (tech creators, lawyers, academics, hacker groups, user advocates, etc) to get together and draft something and then legal tech creators could choose to sign on and self certify and then say “we comply with these standards.”

I think there’s an existing consumer good example of this - possibly in make up or skin care? - but I can’t find it.

I don’t think I hit the full list of things to be covered, but user privacy and data concerns, honesty about capabilities, and transparency requirements of tech used by state actors are all good inclusions. It’s never sat right with me that “lawyer tech competency” is not well defined and I think there could be a way to cram some “tech use by legal professionals” guidelines in there, especially when it comes to down stream uses of your data.

Related: check out this book by Sarah Lamdan “Data Cartels”

Also related: one of the things I’m working on in my more footloose and fancy free life is coming up with a self guided “everything you wanted to know about legal tech but were scared to ask” MOOC and it occurs to me that I really should put an ethics piece in there.

Verdict: neither nailed it or failed it, but definitely not horribly embarrassed and glad I was thinking of this 4.5 years ago.

So that was fun. I’ll leave comments open on this one if you have any ideas about any pieces of a “legal tech code of ethics” that should be included.

And finally, just to end on a fun note, I saw this on Twitter and I have never felt so seen.

Take care,

Sarah

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