Editorial: Legal technology in the service of access to justice

Full text

Editorial: Legal technology in the service of
access to justice
ZSOLT ZŐDI
p
Institute of the Information Society, Ludovika University of Public Service, Budapest, Hungary
EDITORIAL
© 2024 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest
1. INTRODUCTION
On June 23 and 24, 2022, we organized an international conference on legal technologies
(‘legaltech’) at the National University of Public Service
1
in Budapest, Hungary. The following
studies, with the exception of one, are expanded, written versions of the presentations given at
the conference.
At the conference, the lectures were given in three panels: legaltech as a factor increasing
efficiency, legaltech as a factor helping access to law, and regulatory and ethical issues of legal-
tech. In the first topic, experts from international consulting companies and law firms spoke.
After the conference, we believed that the second and third topics –which mostly inspired
university people –were much more pressing and current than improving efficiency, without
disputing its importance, so it was mainly the speakers from the second and third panels who we
asked for the written versions of their presentations. This is how the title of our special issue
came about.
Technology can greatly help ordinary citizens to enter the world of law, to get legal assis-
tance, to understand the provisions of the law, to enforce their rights more easily, and to fulfil
their obligations more easily. From this point of view, ‘access to law’has two meanings. The first,
narrower meaning indicates access to justice: how easy or difficult it is to set the justice system in
pCorresponding author. E-mail: zodi.zsolt@uni-nke.hu
1
The title of the conference was ‘Legal technology and its impact on justice, society, and the legal industry‘.Link1. The
term ‘legaltech’was born in the 90s. There was also a company with that name, but in the USA, from the mid-90s, they
started to organize an exhibition under this name every year, where technologies supporting legal work were presented.
The website ‘law.com’launched its LegalTech News section(link2) in the mid-1990s, and in the late 1990s we increas-
ingly encounter the terms ‘legaltech’or ‘lawtech’in a general sense, referring to any technology used in lawyering.
Around this time, websites dealing with this mushroomed, as well (e.g. link3).
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motion and force it to make a decision. Legal technologies can already play a huge role in this
sense; countless new solutions have been created in recent years that can facilitate this, from
video hearings to various court client information interfaces. However, according to the second,
broader interpretation, access to law also means understanding the law and its easy application
in everyday situations. After all, every day we make purchases, sign contracts, or contact the
authorities. All of these involve “access”to the law, and in these areas the possibilities of new
technologies are perhaps even greater.
In this editorial preface, I would like to discuss two main topics, in addition to a brief
presentation of the studies published in the special issue, which I will do by inserting them into
the text. Both are a kind of theoretical preliminary question concerning legaltech.
The first such preliminary question is about ‘legal informatics’or ‘legaltech’as a discipline:
what do we mean by legaltech and how does it relate to legal informatics, which has been known
for a long time? How has the subject itself developed over time, and with generative artificial
intelligences (primarily large language models, LLMs, such as Chat GPT) have we really reached
a tipping point? Finally, we must ask whether the creation and study of legal technologies can
be considered an academic discipline at all, and if so, what kind of discipline we are talking
about?
The second group of preliminary questions that I would like to discuss does not deal with
legaltech as a discipline, but about some exciting legal theoretical problems raised by legaltech,
such as whether lawyers can be replaced by machines, how far automatization can be taken in
law, and what (social) problems and risks are raised by automatization, and the disappearance of
the human factor from certain areas.
2. QUESTIONS OF LEGALTECH AS A DISCIPLINE
2.1. What is legaltech and legal informatics?
Legaltech has become a trendy topic. Although its predecessor, legal informatics,
2
has existed as
a discipline since the 1980s, mainstream legal scholars classified it more on the fringes of
jurisprudence, if it was considered jurisprudence at all.
3
At (Hungarian) law schools, it actually
meant teaching basic computer skills (word processing, spreadsheet management, legal database
use) at a time when the Internet either did not exist or was just a curiosity. The area of legal
informatics that was also taken seriously by legal education fell into the category of ‘IT law’and
included areas such as data protection, software law or computer crimes.
4
The situation changed radically in the 2000s. First, the Internet and the large amount of legal
documents and data published on the Internet, and then the easy availability of various natural
language processing (NLP) technologies has spawned a range of new legal technology solutions
and services that an increasing number of lawyers and legal organizations have begun to use.
2
Legal technology (legaltech) and legal IT, see Ződi (2021a,2021b).
3
On the distinction between legal informatics and IT law, and on the theoretical status and history of these disciplines,
see Ződi (2012) 21.
4
The best-known Hungarian textbook of the period is Balogh (1998).
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Nowadays, not only are there several conferences,
5
journals
6
and books
7
dealing with the topic,
but legaltech labs, research centers and departments
8
have also been established at several
universities, and countless courses
9
dealing with legal technology have been launched, all trying
to stand out from the crowd, partly with postgraduate programs and partly with spectacular
projects.
10
In order to better understand what has made legal technology so trendy, and what this
special issue intends to discuss, it is worth clarifying some concepts and distinctions. First of
all, the concept of ‘legal technology’itself, because even in this area, it seems, there is some
confusion. After all, a series of technological solutions that are usually referred to under this
label are actually not specifically legal technology, but well-known office automation or commu-
nication solutions that are used by lawyers to perform their tasks. In this context, we can even
quickly come to the conclusion that legal technology, ‘legaltech’, does not actually exist at all.
We see only workflow and document management, case and customer management (Customer
Relationship Management –CRM) software, which is based on widely used database manage-
ment technologies that are accidentally used by lawyers. We see technologies that enable general
electronic communication that happen to be used by legal entities and their clients. There are
language processing, information extraction, indexing and search software that actually process
legal documents, extract legally relevant data and search the text of legal sources. There are
generative general purpose (general purpose) chatbots that can answer legal problems and
produce legal documents. Does it make a difference that these technologies are used in the legal
field?
Since the title of this special issue contains the word legaltech, it is easy to guess that we, the
authors of the special issue, do not share this view. The IT solutions are general technologies in
the field of legaltech, but the way they are used, and the persons and entities who use them, as
well as the data they store, the process they reflect, and the outputs they produce are indeed
specific. Legal data and documents are stored and processed during legal operations, are mainly
used by lawyers, and the output of many systems is some legally relevant document. And this
characteristic has significance, namely that in the world of law it is not possible to choose any IT
solution. The level of security is high. Legal documents have a fixed structure and must contain
5
For example, the one from the USA LegalWeek, which is the legal successor of the LegalTech conference (link1),
6
Until recently, legal technology was a section of papers dealing with technological law (for example, infocommunica-
tion law). This has changed in recent years, with independent journals specifically focusing on legal technologies and
innovation emerging (e.g. link5,link6,link7).
7
For example, Szostek and Załucki (2021),Katz et al. (2021).
8
For example, CODEX –The Stanford Center of Legal Informatics(link8); Center for Legal and Court Technology at
William and Mary Law School(link9); Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law in Universität Wien
(link10).
9
Back in 2019, the ABA Journal of the American Bar Association asked US law schools about their courses related to
legal technology, and received a response from 12 universities that such a course existed, although the article questions
the usability of the paper and the knowledge obtained from them. Ward and Tashea (2019), in Europe: The University
of Law MsC program in Legal Technology(link11), but otherwise in the UK (perhaps due to the large law firms and
their high level of digitization) many law schools offer such a course (Bristol, Swansea, Salford, Arden).
10
Here, it is worth mentioning the well-known article by Katz and his co-authors, in which they passed the federal legal
exam with Chat GPT. Katz et al. (2023).
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the applicable law: it is not enough that they have ‘relatively good’content; very often they can
only have one type of content. It is not possible to perform any action in court proceedings, and
the room for manoeuvre of the judge and the parties is also limited: several studies in this special
issue
11
also discuss the consequences of this limitation for technology. In law, it is not enough to
simply make a good decision, the decisions must be reasoned, in a structured manner.
12
Because
of all this, it can be said that legaltech is a meaningfully separable part of general IT, because
both when creating the systems and when studying them, the legal subject area (domain) makes
a difference.
2.2. Eras of legal technologies
Legaltech became a particularly popular term and topic in the mid-2010s. To understand this, it
is worth taking a look at the eras of legal technologies. We can distinguish three main eras: the
eras of office automation, of online communication and of machine learning (MI, Big Data),
which can also be called the first, second and third eras of legal informatics.
The era of office automation starts with the appearance of large mainframe machines
(roughly in the 1960s in the USA, more in the late 1970s in Europe, and in Hungary in the
early 1990s of local networks based on PCs) until the advent of the Internet. We can also
separate sub-eras within this. Until the advent of the PC, various mainframe public databases
maintained by large public organizations around the world represented ‘legal informatics’, which
were coloured by the USA’s online legal databases (Lexis, then Lexis-Nexis)
13
from the begin-
ning of the 1970s. From the 1980s, the computer appeared in smaller organizations outside the
government (in the USA also at law firms) and started to be used for office workflow manage-
ment. At first, of course, only the metadata and storage location of the documents were recorded
(‘filing systems’), but later these were supplemented with other data necessary for case manage-
ment (‘case management systems’). These systems already stored customer and case data, were
able to manage certain group work processes (e.g. distribution of cases, shared calendars),
and then the content of documents were added to the systems (‘document management
systems’in an integrated form: ‘workflow management systems’). These systems, with an almost
identical operational logic, spread in the central justice system and in the private legal industry
(at law firms).
The Internet brought dramatic changes to legal informatics around the first years of the
2000s. Various forms of online information and online communication appeared –partly due to
legal pressure –in the judicial sector.
There are two main forms of information systems in terms of content: the first one is for the
general public, and contains the organizational, operational and legal basic information of
the judicial sphere, including the legal environment (legislative databases, free legal information)
and judicial decisions. Electronic freedom of information legislation (eFOI)
14
was initiated
in almost all European countries in the first decade of the 2000s. In Hungary, this happened
11
For example, the studies of Osztovits, Lillo and Pálfi.
12
Ződi (2022).
13
Ződi (2012) 78–83.
14
The first place here also belongs to the USA (Electronic Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 USC § 552, 1996), but
was followed relatively quickly by various Western countries (United Kingdom: 2000, Hungary: 2005, Germany: 2006).
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in 2005, and then, after a long delay, it actually came into force in mid-2007: its impact was
huge, since tens of thousands of court judgments representing the everyday life of the legal
system became visible at once.
The second type of information system are the systems of case-rooms or extranets. The
essence of these was that the legal representative or the client of the law firm was given limited
access via a web interface to the server of the court or the law firm, where he or she could view
the documents related to a specific case. In the case of technologies related to electronic commu-
nication, this also means that documents and submissions are also moved electronically. In the
early days, this meant more traditional e-mail communication, but later more communication
via a central portal. Electronic communication immediately brings into focus the problem of
authentication, which was initially thought to be solved with a two-key electronic signature, but
nowadays is more likely to be solved with a two-step identification (e.g. assuming the use of a
mobile device).
As the second era ended, office workflow support systems (the technologies of the first
generation) also moved to the web in most countries, and certain functions have even been
made available via mobile apps.
We are now entering the third era, and the popularization of the term legaltech coincides
with this. This era, which began roughly around 2010, is referred to by various adjectives: the era
of artificial intelligence, the big data era, the era of data-driven
15
law. If we want to organize the
many new technologies that appeared and spread in this decade, and which will be discussed in
the special issue, around some kind of unified idea or logic, then we can use the term ‘disruptive
technologies’. The term refers to technologies that have the potential to completely change work
processes and not just speed up old processes or increase efficiency.
16
The most important and
disruptive technology of the era is undoubtedly Chat GPT (3.5, then 4.0) or in more general
terms, generative artificial intelligence-based chatbot services. The impact of generative LLMs on
law is currently very difficult to estimate, and the study by Péter Homoki and Zsolt Ződi in the
volume attempts to do so.
2.3. What kind of discipline is legal informatics?
The third obvious methodological-scientific theoretical question is whether the creation and
study of legal technologies as an activity is a science at all, and if so, in which scientific field can
it be classified?
If we read through the studies published here, or the works of some of the leading figures of
the field,
17
we encounter basically three types of discourse in them.
In the case of the first type of discourse, it is worth starting from the fact that the concrete
creation, planning and development of legal IT solutions is not an academic discipline, but a
practical activity. At the same time, this practical activity has certain theoretical foundations in
computer science and this theoretical-computer science, mathematical, logical way of speaking is
the first type of ‘legaltech science’. We can think of authors such as Giovanni Sartor or Kevin
15
Katz (2013).
16
Susskind (2008) 99–141.
17
Susskind (1986,1988),Ashley (1991),Sartor (1993),Reiling (2009),Szostek and Zalucki (2021),Katz and Bommarito
(2021).
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Ashley, who also discuss the world of law against the background of computer science and/or
mathematics and logic. For them, law is just one area of everyday problems that can be solved
with the tools of mathematics or formal logic. This branch of legal informatics has contributed
to the development of legaltech in many different ways, either through theoretical clarification
or through the mathematization or algorithmization of very specific legal and jurisprudential
problems. The Artificial Intelligence and Law journal
18
has published hundreds of studies
following this approach since the beginning of the 90s, but here we can also mention Ashley’s
epoch-making book on the HYPO expert system, or Richard Susskind’s early works.
19
In this
special issue, this discourse is slightly less evident than the other two described later, but the
study by Renátó Vági and his co-authors definitely uses this approach, since a specific case-study
he shares with us tells the lessons of a legal text classification project based on unsupervised
learning. In the project, the clustering and topic modeling of various types of Hungarian legal
documents were carried out in order to obtain a clearer, more searchable, and therefore more
easily accessible database for the general public.
Legaltech’s second type of discourse is very close to classic legal doctrinal scholarship (in
Continental Europe: ‘dogmatic science’). This area is not a very old area of legaltech, since
lawyers only started dealing with it seriously when technological solutions supporting legal work
appeared in legal organizations and legislation, mainly in the form of electronic procedures. This
was given a huge boost by the pandemic. In this area, the authors describe legal institutions and
legislation, analyse their relationships, and place their concepts and provisions in a conceptual
network, in a higher system, with regard to technology or in a specific context of a technological
solution. They often use the tools of criticism and explain their proposals for a better future
regulation (de lege ferenda). Several of the articles in the special issue belong to this category,
although, as we will see, it can often overlap with the third (legal-sociological-organizational-
management) approach. Above all, the study by Nóra Chronowski and her co-authors origi-
nated in this area, in which legal cases related to negotiations forced into virtual space due to the
pandemic are reviewed. Their method is classic doctrinal analysis –they take into account what
questions the courts have faced due to the virtualization of real, in-person hearings, and what
answers they have given. Similarly, Berenika Kaczmarek-Templin uses a predominantly
doctrinal approach. After reviewing the digitization of Polish litigation and extrajudicial pro-
cedures, she reviews the impact of this process on the basic principles of civil procedure law. Her
final conclusion is quite cautious: according to her, the principles of the current civil procedure
law are basically not affected by digitalization, and major changes in this area are not expected
due to technology.
András Osztovits analyses a very similar topic in his writing, but comes to a radically
different conclusion. According to him, the basic principles of civil procedure law have ‘hard-
ened into dogma’, and due to technological development, their complete revision would be
necessary. Ultimately, civil litigation itself, as the main system of rules for judicial dispute
resolution, should be placed on other principles, among which the ‘right to a modern trial’
should be the most important. The court decision does not take place in a vacuum, he says.
Today, a business has countless alternative options to settle its legal conflicts. In this situation,
18
It is currently published by Springer. Website at link12.
19
The Latend Damage System, Susskind (1988).
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the courts are forced to compete and may lose this competition if they do not adapt to the
requirements of the modern age.
It is mainly the doctrinal centre of gravity which is adopted for Ricardo Manuel Lillo’s study,
which provides an insight into the South American legaltech scene, which is otherwise at the
forefront of the world in many respects. From his study, we can learn primarily about the
situation in Chile. His approach is also legal doctrinal (dispute resolution) and, in accordance
with the special issue, access to justice is his main topic. He also attributes a serious catalytic role
to the pandemic, and concludes that the use of electronic devices and virtual negotiations will be
the ‘new normal’from now on.
Finally, the doctrinal aspects dominate in the writing of Dóra Pálfi, who scrutinizes the
validity of the basic principles of civil procedural rights in the light of a specific technology:
online dispute resolution systems (ODR). According to her conclusion, ODRs can be much
more efficient and user-friendly than the courts’traditional dispute resolution tools, and it is no
coincidence that ODRs now manage more legal disputes than courts –mainly on online
platforms. Based on this, Pálfi–in line with Osztovits’writing –says that for ordinary people,
speed and efficient dispute resolution are often more important than the full application of all
procedural principles. This predicts the expansion of these systems in the future.
The third type of speech and approach that characterizes those who reflect on legaltech is the
sociological-organizational (management-science) approach. The characteristic of this discourse
is that it either carries out the analysis starting from a real problem or, in the case of legaltech,
very often, from a specific technology. Its key points are the following: what technological
possibilities are available in the legal field, how technology can help access to law or improve
the efficiency of legal work, what organizational measures this entails, and what risks it may
entail, as well as how risks can be avoided. This discourse rarely occurs on its own; it is often
mixed with the doctrinal approach, since the risks often represent legal risks. Several such
transitional, half-management-science, half-doctrinal studies can be found in the special issue
as well.
The article by Dániel Necz can be classified into this transitional category, as it primarily
attempts to take into account the data protection risks of chatbots, one of the most important
technological innovations of the recent past. Chatbots can –apparently –perform some legal
work, and they represent a huge potential for informing the layperson, but at the moment they
also have serious risks, and it is almost certain that their use will have to be regulated to a
significant degree.
Finally, the article by Péter Homoki and Zsolt Ződi belongs to this third category as well.
The article already reflects on the problem of chatbots, which exploded after the conference.
As the study says, Large Language Models will basically be used in three areas in law, apart from
those uses that are general and not legal-specific, such as education, ‘translation’between IT
systems and people, and the construction of knowledge management systems (e.g. organization
of the common knowledge base of legal organizations, and putting information there). These
specifically legal uses are as follows: 1. Text retrieval, legal source research and provision of legal
information for lay people. 2. Text generation and legal document assembly. 3. Text analysis,
and classification of large legal text corpora, extracting information from them and ‘legal
analysis’(e.g. analysis of litigants or judges). In the second half of the study, Péter Homoki
describes his own experiences and experiments, in which he tried to test Chat GPT in a small
law office environment.
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3. TWO LEGAL THEORETICAL PROBLEMS OF LEGALTECH
In this section I would like to deal with two legal-theoretical issues, both raised by the legal
technologies. These questions almost always arise in some form when it comes to legal
technologies. The first and most obvious question that concerns all of us is whether
lawyerscanbereplacedbymachines.Theansweris,ofcourse,yes,theycanbereplaced
in certain areas, but the most important question is precisely in which areasthiscanhappen,
and which areas will be difficult for machines to access. Below, I argue that the so-called
ex ante law, which is increasingly focused on prevention, can be especially well algorithmized,
so this area will slowly be dominated by technology, while the traditional, ex post law
(criminal law and civil law on obligations, damage and part of family law), which is strongly
embedded in values, ethics and our everyday narratives, is less suitable for automatization,
even if generative artificial intelligence, and large language models (‘Chat GPT’) promise
just that.
3.1. Can lawyers be replaced by machines?
In connection with legal technologies, there is almost always a problem that is considered a
kind of centre of the entire topic: can technology one day completely replace the work of
a lawyer? Which legal processes can be supported and automated with a computer, and which
cannot?
Susskind, in his book The End of Lawyers,
20
wittily asks the question whether lawyers will
disappear one day, just as tallow chandlers and wheelwrights vanished. Susskind’s answer starts
from the fact that lighting and transportation are still necessary today, but we no longer light
with candles and we no longer travel with horse-drawn carriages: in the case of lighting, electric
lighting, and in the case of transportation, the invention of the combustion engine represented
the technological revolution that eliminated the two professions from the face of the earth. In
order to be able to say whether the legal profession will also disappear from the face of the earth,
in the first step we should therefore define the more distant function and need that lawyers
fulfil in the social division of labour, and in the second step we should find the key technology
that can change this function and need to such an extent that it may eventually lead to the
disappearance of the legal profession in the traditional sense.
Susskind’s answer is quite radical –especially in his book The Future of the Professions.
21
It starts from the fact that lawyers, just like other professions, possess special knowledge that
can only be acquired over a longer period of time and, within the framework of a kind of
social contract, the society pays these professions to make their knowledge available to other
members of the community. The computer and the Internet, as well as various technological
solutions (e.g. legal information pages, automatic document generation applications and online
dispute resolution platforms) democratize knowledge of law and make it accessible to everyone.
Lawyers, having lost their role as mediators of knowledge, will therefore disappear in their
present form.
20
Susskind (2008) 4.
21
Susskind and Susskind (2022).
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Susskind’s other essential point about legal technologies is that technologies affect the image
of a profession in two waves. The first wave of technologies is always about improving efficiency,
but in such a way that the processes, rules, and techniques of the given profession do not change
–they just speed up and become more efficient. However, technological development does not
stop, and it is inherent in development that it slowly begins to change the processes of the given
profession: those processes are no longer more efficient, but are carried out in a completely
different way, or the same goal is achieved with completely different means. In the end, not only
the processes, but also the entire profession and its social embeddedness will change, and in
extreme cases the profession will even disappear. According to Susskind, in law (and in several
other professions) we have moved into the second phase. Exactly when and what caused this
remains unknown to our author, but according to him, the change has occurred and the com-
plete transformation is already taking place.
In neither the first
22
nor the second edition
23
of the book did the authors define what the
ultimate function of law would be, the ultimate need, which, for example, is lighting in the case
of tally chandlers, and the satisfaction of which is facilitated by lawyers. From the ‘disruptive
technologies’mentioned in Susskind’s previous books, this can be inferred backwards. Legal
information will be provided by interactive and increasingly ‘smart’legal information sites
instead of lawyers, document editing by automatic document assembly systems, and dispute
resolution by online dispute resolution systems. According to this, the three functions of law are
legal information, document preparation and dispute resolution.
The first problem with this line of thought is that all this may be the activity of lawyers, but it
is by no means the function of law, even though, based on the above examples (tallow chandlers
and wheelwrights), the question is not the function of the professions, but the function of the
products produced by the professions (lighting and change of location). However, ‘legal infor-
mation’, which is the starting point of one of his most important arguments, says nothing about
the function of law itself. The same problem is with the drafting of documents: we do not write
legal documents for their own sake, but because we want to achieve some goal with them –and
the question is precisely what that goal is. Only the ODR systems refer to a more distant
function, dispute and conflict resolution, which is currently carried out by the courts –although
a recurring motif in several of Susskind’s books is that it is done very poorly, slowly and
expensively, and there is a lot of truth in this.
3.2. Algorithmizing the law: ex ante and ex post law
There is a good reason why Susskind does not give a clearer answer to this question: the question
of the function of law is one of the hardest puzzles in legal theory, precisely because law is a
multifunctional machine.
24
This means that the legal profession is also a multi-functional pro-
fession: the analogy of manufacturing wheels simply does not work for it. If we were to somehow
try to organize these functions into meaningful groups, specifically focusing on our topic
(automation, replacing people with machines and algorithms), then two large groups of
22
Susskind and Susskind (2014).
23
Susskind and Susskind (2022).
24
Szabó (2015) 74–76.
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functions stand out: reactive and proactive (preventive) functions,
25
or in other words, ex post
and the ex ante regulation,
26
again in a different approach, the law of responsibility and the
compliance regulation.
27
The reactive (ex post, responsibility) functions of law are closely related to the value of justice.
This type of law works by reacting to events (mostly violations of law) after the fact has
occurred. Violations can be explicit violations of law (such behaviours that are dangerous to
society and punishable under criminal law), or private law negligence rules. In such cases, the
task of the law is to react retrospectively to some past event.
Proactive (ex ante, compliance) law is not related to justice as a value, but rather to the
coordination, risk management, and predictive function of law. This set of rules aims to prevent
violations, problems, damages, risks, and negative social situations defined by ex post law:
it regulates, organizes, and coordinates people’s actions in advance. Ex ante regulation some-
times does not even control human behaviour, but even before that, it describes the environment
itself, the architecture, the requirements, dimensions, and characteristics of physical objects or
technologies. It is very often technology and process regulation in the form of protocols.
From this point of view, it is clear that the legal activities mentioned by Susskind belong to
both categories. ‘Information providing’as a function can appear in almost all areas of law, from
information on the provisions of consumer contracts, to warnings about media content not
intended for minors, to warnings about the rights of the defendant. But what they have in
common is that information is one of the most important concrete ways of implementing the ex
ante function, an important case of avoiding risks. The situation is similar with document
assembly. Documents are usually tools to achieve a more distant goal: contracts, as paradigmatic
cases of legal documents, are promises made for the future, and they often try to make the
course of a future transaction predictable. Again, this is only an ex ante activity. Finally,
the procedural part of conflict resolution, the online dispute resolution systems, are also ex ante
rules, which state the protocols according to which the legal dispute will be conducted.
I argue here, that while in the case of reactive functions, the ex post law legal technologies
will only have supporting roles for an unforeseeably long time, in the case of ex ante law legal
technology may even completely take over the activities that have been carried out by lawyers so
far, although not all activities. That is, lawyers will almost certainly be forced out of certain
activities they currently perform due to technological development.
In the case of reactive law, technology will only have a supporting role, although sometimes
it will be a supporting role solving very serious cognitive tasks. In criminal proceedings to be
carried out in response to crimes (as in the classic field of reactive law), there can be plenty of
25
‘Proactive law’is sometimes associated with ‘preventive law’,(Pohjonen (2006) 53–70. The preventive law movement
started in America in the 1950s and its basic idea was that, similarly to preventive medicine, law must first of all prevent
the trouble, and not fix it afterwards, in a costly way, e.g. through litigation. The same idea appears in the 1970s, now in
the context of ‘prior’and ‘after’law; Wittman (1977) 193–212. Regarding preventive law, see Stole et al. (1997).
26
The distinction between ex ante and ex post was introduced in the 90s by the Law and Economics movement
(cf. Kamin and Rachlinski (1995) and Jolls et al. (1998). In the EU, as far as I know, the difference between the ex
ante and ex post approach first arose in telecommunications regulation, which then became part of the scientific
discourses of competition law, before emerging in a number of other fields. Most recently, see Georgieva (2021).
27
Such is the so-called EU New Legislative Framework system, which is market surveillance and product evaluation
(product conformity assessment) containing a complex set of rules. See link4.
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room for automation and legal technologies (e.g. software that predicts the risk of recidivism,
or ‘traditional’work acceleration software such as legal research databases), but it is highly
unlikely that at some future time a robot prosecutor, robot attorney or robot judge will emerge
who be able to reconstruct and ‘narrate’the facts of a crime committed by a person in the past
in accordance with the needs of the criminal procedure, and then interpret the legislation
and impose a penalty. (Although in the case of the latter, software that processes thousands
of previous cases and proposes measures based on them is not at all a fantasy.) In the case of ex
post law, the limitation of technology is the establishment of facts, and its formation into a
coherent legal narrative. This activity is so deeply embedded in ‘common sense’or ‘foreknowl-
edge’narratives that there will not be a machine capable of imitating this for an unforeseeably
long time. In addition, ex post law maintains a very close relationship with the value of justice,
which also stems from the collective practice of the community.
From this point of view, the appearance of LLMs (Chat GPT) does not change the situation
radically. While LLM-s produce text from text, the first stage of a criminal proceeding is the most
difficult, when the actors in the legal field begin to weave a story from material evidence,
investigative reports, testimonies –i.e. lay texts and non-texts –in a collective effort.
28
An
LLM can only generate text from text (prompts), so it won’t know what to do with, or how
to interpret –for example, –physical evidence. Moreover, it is questionable whether an LLM can
shape a disintegrating, wandering, or even confabulating layman’s narrative into a legal docu-
ment necessary for the legal process, and squeeze it into the Procrustean bed of legal concepts
and provisions.
However, the situation is completely different for proactive or ex ante legal functions. The
coordination of human actions due to expediency or the optimal use of resources, as well as the
guarantee of safety in dangerous situations is already very often realized with the help of
technology, or indirectly, through the regulation of technology. Even now, the lawyers’task
here is more the creation of the regulations and the monitoring of compliance with the regu-
lations. With the spread of technology, this will change to the extent that the latter (compliance
activity) will increasingly be taken away from us by technology. Compliance with laws, quan-
tities, measures, minimum regulations, and safety provisions will be monitored by sensors and
algorithms, and other algorithms will guide disturbed systems back into optimal ranges. Thus, it
is up to the lawyers to create the rules that create the technologies. These systems will never be
able to set goals. It will be the task of human lawyers to set goals, or to translate goals created
elsewhere (e.g. in politics or business decision-making) into legal goals. That will not be per-
formed by machines either.
And there is no doubt that new, generative artificial intelligence has brought many new
things: in the ‘translation’of law, and in the field of legal advice for lay people. Here, however,
it must be seen that this turn has been brewing for a long time. Modern internet search engines
already represent a huge step forward in providing legal information to the layman, as they
quickly found the typical common problems that had already been solved, and LLMs only raised
this to a higher level by being able to provide the solution in a form of a text, and a neat answer.
In the case of document generation, the situation is also similar, LLMs are able to produce
beautiful and, in the case of typical documents, almost flawless outputs. In these cases, however,
28
Szabó (2010).
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for a very long time it will remain the case that both the lawyer and the layman will check and
correct the output document –in these cases, therefore, it is not about replacing the lawyer, but
about performing his or her work much more efficiently.
The studies you can read here only provide a small slice of legal technology, but I hope that
even this small slice shows that legaltech will become an increasingly important part of our lives.
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