Good news, everyone! Video from FutureLaw is officially up:
Enjoy! Let us know if there’s any problems or questions — tim@robotandhwang.com.
So, FutureLaw 2013 was last week. We over here at RR&H are thrilled about how it all turned out, and can’t thank everyone who came out to speak or to participate in the discussion enough. It exceeded all our expectations about what we wanted to get out of the event, and couldn’t have done it without everyone’s support.
Video is on the way: the good people over at Stanford have let me know that all the sessions will be available online in about two weeks (we’ll post here when it all goes live). In the meanwhile, a good number of people have been asking how it all went, so I figured it would be worth putting some thoughts together here for your reading pleasure.
First off, and I think this was evident to everyone in the room last Friday – big things are happening. The New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference (NELIC), which was the conference that RR&H ran in 2011 on similar topics, was simply no comparison. If conferences are any indication, FutureLaw was a clear sign that the legal technology community has become far more robust in just the past two years. First, the community is significantly bigger – NELIC attracted about ~90 registered attendees, FutureLaw in comparison brought together close to ~250 attendees both in-state and from around the world. Second, the energy is much higher — attendees at FutureLaw were more often than not entrepreneurs themselves, and came packing their own ideas about the future of the law to the table. Third, a broader set of talents are part of the conversation than ever before – in addition to bringing together nerdy lawyer-technologist types, FutureLaw featured a broader set of practitioners, funders, and others than NELIC did two years ago.
But, as RR&H friend Dan Katz hammered home in his flamethrowing (and awesome) keynote closer the future is not self-executing. While there’s a ton of energy around disruptive technologies in the legal industry, there are still global challenges facing the space that will determine whether what is being worked on has the long-standing impact on the law that it seems everyone (insert: us, lawyers, the public at large) wants to see.
To that end, FutureLaw was remarkable in how much consensus there was around a few key systemwide challenges. While (as with any complex issue) there obviously remains a great deal of difference of opinion about how best to achieve these ends, a set of themes kept coming up over and over again in the panel discussions and informal conversations swirling around the conference that day. FutureLaw focused on what we build next, and I venture to say that there is some emergent agreement about what the community should set its eyes towards.
I’ve been dubbing this informal list in my head as The Stanford Consensus, a kind of working document of critical objectives that people in legal technology are working towards. They are important partially because they represent infrastructure – common resources that should be built in order for the community to thrive and for us to take things to the next level. That agenda (in no particular order), and some remarks, after the jump.
After a few months work under the watchful eye of my robot superiors billing hours, I’m happy to announce that we’ve largely finalized the run of show for the conference that Robot, Robot & Hwang will be curating at Stanford Law on April 26th with the Stanford Center on Legal Informatics.
FutureLaw 2013, as it is now being called — features a host of sessions I’m thrilled to be able to bring together. You can see the latest updated schedule here.
Also: registration has officially opened, and you can pick up a pass here. Worth acting soon — registration has been humming along, and the price will rise on April 1st. We also have a limited number of comp passes for friends of the firm that we’re happy to distribute, just drop a line to tim@robotandhwang.com.
For those who are interested (and because our offices have been getting some questions from the public), I thought I would post up here some general remarks on the design of the upcoming conference, what the goals of the event are, and how the selection of topics came together into the resulting five panels and two keynotes that will be the day’s content on April 26th. More after the jump.
We’ve been quiet for some time here at the offices of Robot, Robot & Hwang LLP. This has been the result of a variety of factors. For one, our senior partners have been busy upgrading to their legal firmware and moving our offices to an undersea data haven. And, as always, our human associates have been absolutely crushed under the work as of late.
But, we’re glad to say that our long silence is at an end: our firm is excited to announce today that we’ll be organizing a conference at Stanford Law School in association with the good people of the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, to be held on April 26, 2013.
We’re envisioning this gathering as a bigger, badder, and better follow-up to our 2010 New and Emerging Legal Infrastructure Conference. It will tackle all the massive developments that have happened since that first conference two years ago, and be a meeting point for all the people now working in the space.
This new conference is intended as a place to dive deep into the looming questions at the intersection of law and code, and for the community to share their experiences, collaborate on projects, and plan for the future. We’re excited.
So: April 26. Save the date! More details to come soon.
So, the big initial intellectual task in my mind is: what is legal hacking? And then: who are legal hackers? The game, as per usual, depends on definitions. Thankfully, those definitions seem to lend itself to a good overall structure of conversation here.
Amidst all the sturm und drang of discussion around “legal hackers” and “legal hacking,” it seems safe at least to say that the least useful definition here — pragmatically speaking — will be one that tries to cut something entirely out of new cloth. Instead, it’ll be more productive to build a definition from the types of things that people refer to when they use the phrase. In my experience, there’s sort of three broad categories of meanings that people try to express with the concept (that each come with their unique baggage). These are:
The term “legal hacker” and “legal hackathon” have been bandied about for some time now, and its use seems to have gone through a bit of a renaissance in the past few months in the legal technology space.
RR&H views this development with some mixed feelings. On one hand, it’s great. Awareness about the increasing intersections between computer code and the law require some kind of brand – and any common brand that helps spread the word is alright in our book. “Hacker” is cool and a bit subversive, and we’d be lying if we didn’t say that was alright by us.
On the other hand, to be honest – it’s intellectually flabby. No one at all seems to have a cohesive, concise framework for what, indeed, legal “hacking” is or would imply. No one is at all sure if the idea can weather sustained discussion and argument. At present it seems to gesture vaguely at a not entirely coherent jumble of people, practices, technologies, business models, educational approaches, skill sets, and much more.
The obvious question, then, is whether or not it is actually a useful category. Does it describe something truly new? Is it just a weak attempt to paste a neat title onto an industry in flux (or decline, depending on your view)? Are there more effective ways of explaining or describing the space that we’re in? We’re not honestly sure ourselves.
One thing seems clear though: there’s a need to have a better ongoing dialogue about these issues that steps back from the daily humdrum of the latest product or company acquisition.While people like Richard Susskind and the late Larry Ribstein have laid some of the intellectual groundwork – there’s room to stage an ongoing conversation online with a broader scope of participants and a quicker pace of publication.
We’ll be doing exactly that.
Phew! It has been awhile over on this here blog — senior partners have been keeping us busy with work on the upcoming release of our CorpBot Toolkit. Anyways, we’re finally getting some fresh air and (trying) to even out our florescent, computer screen tan in the next few weeks. There’s two events that RR&H will be making an appearance at:
Friends over at the Stanford Center for Computers and the Law are doing a small day long get-together gathering the entrepreneurs, scholars, and financiers that are working in disruptive technology in the legal industry in the Bay Area. Looking to be a showcase of a ton of awesome companies that are working in the space, as well as a good chance to unconference and scheme more generally.
The link above mentions that the event is invite only – but give us a holler (tim AT robotandhwang.com), if you want to get on the guest list and we’ll be happy to get you the deets. We’ll be there throughout the day, and then will be doing one of our usual disruptive legal technology dinners/meetups, so if you’re Mountain View-based and want to meet up afterwards, we’ll be all decamping somewhere around 7 that day. Just watch the @RobotandHwang.
John Randall and the team over at BLIP are engaged in a neat experiment: can hackathons be deployed among lawyers to stimulate new ideas and collaborations as effectively as they are in the software/web space? It’s not something that we’ve heard done much in the past, and something that we’re excited to see play out and would love to have more of, frankly.
We’re trapped out (unfortunately!) in the Bay Area, but we’ll be tuning in on Skype big-head-on-a-screen style to give a short talk entitled “Horses To Water” – about battle plans for actually achieving adoption of legal tech in a world full of haters (lawyers). If you’re going to be around NYC, registration is available here.
Anyways, we’d love to hang out at either (or both) of these events. Hope to catch you all around!
Greetings everyone! For all of those who came out to our New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference in April, thank you. We had an extraordinary turnout of lawyers, technologists, and other good folks — and we’re still buzzing over here at headquarters about some of the tremendously exciting cross-disciplinary discussions that emerged during the panels.
In the intervening month of May, the partners over here at Robot, Robot & Hwang have been sifting through a variety of different project ideas and trying to figure out what we’ll be doing as we move into the summer months out here in the Bay Area. In partnership with our collaborator Dazza Greenwood (his corresponding cross-post here) the senior partners have settled on a direction and glad to say we can go public with what we’ve been scheming about.
Glad to announce today that we’re officially looking for funding to pursue the deployment of the Corpbot Project, a flexible, open-source toolkit for developers to easily program autonomous corporations.
What is an autonomous corporation you might ask? We’ve been thinking for some time it’d be amazing to develop and deploy real legal entities that can be programmed to execute legal actions on their own without any human involvement. Such a corporation could be designed to self-execute the trading of assets, mergers, the creation of subsidiaries, the bringing lawsuits, and the transfer of funds systematically based on sets of rules or some external stimuli. It’d be amazing to have a community of developers that builds on this tookit, exploring all that can accomplished by floating up these automated legal entities (virtual corporate machines, if you will) and seeing what happens when development on these entities is made widely accessible. This would be a true kind of hacking on legal code: experimenting with various programs that actually influence the behavior of the legal system.
In short, the plan is to bring corporate personhood another step up through technology. The vision is that these corporations could serve a role as actors in a real marketplace, as well as opening up interesting experiments in the space for the management of a whole variety of assets both real and virtual.
So how are we pulling this off? Our initial proposed proof of concept this summer is a project to boot up a small network of autonomous corporations that will manage a formal legal transaction of some asset. Some simple object, then, like a chair or a piece of land, could be rapidly traded among these corporations, changing formal ownership of the object every few minutes. Given the “permissions” given to various individuals, this could make access to that object unpredictably tortious or legal once sold to the network of corporations. Best of all, these corporations could be set to eliminate access to their own servers after a period of time by randomly changing their own passwords, making it difficult to intervene in the action of these legal automatons without completely unplugging the machine driving them (tougher when that machine is in the cloud, too).
We think that’d be pretty neat and opens some fun possibilities. If all goes according to plan, we’ll be showing off this technology at an event in September where we release the code to play around with this stuff.
Robot, Robot & Hwang is fronting some of the cost of bringing on a developer, but we’re looking for an institutional partner to join us to help fund the rest of the development of this project full-time. You can read the full one-pager proposal here on the details (in handy dandy PDF form). If you know of someone who might be into supporting this, or want to help out in some way, definitely drop us a line at tim@robotandhwang.com. To stay in the loop with the project generally, drop us a line and get subscribed at our contact page for updates!
Had a great time at the conference last week, thanks to everyone who came out!
Due to the efforts of the extraordinarily efficient Berkeley Law AV team, also glad to say that as of today the complete session video from NELIC is now available online! Worth checking out if you missed some of the sessions, or weren’t able to make it to the conference. We’ve embedded the panel on quantitative legal prediction above, and you can watch/embed/download/share all of it on Blip.tv.
For all of you coming to NELIC tomorrow, we’re looking forward to having you at Berkeley Law School!
I’m glad to round out these final few hours before the conference by announcing that we’re officially holding a post-conference get together tomorrow a few blocks from the law school at Henry’s, located on 2600 Durant Avenue (map).
Even if you can’t make it out to the sessions tomorrow, you’re welcome to join us and meet some of the attendees and speakers! We’ll be there roughly from 5 o’clock onwards, depending on whether or not things run over at the conference. Hope to see some of you there!
