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    May 7th, 2013

    ♫ There’s a Law, there’s an Arm, there’s a Hand
    There’s a Law, there’s an Arm, there’s a Hand… ♫

    Words, music and lyrics by Leonard Cohen.

    law is code

    Lawrence Lessig wrote a very famous book called Code is Law (now in version 2 simply called Code v2).  In these books, Lawrence (and here I am guilty of oversimplification but at least I can claim that this is Lawrence’s own oversimplification from his web site describing the books):

    “More than any other social space, cyberspace would be controlled or not depending upon the architecture, or “code,” of that space. And that meant regulators, and those seeking to protect cyberspace from at least some forms of regulation, needed to focus not just upon the work of legislators, but also the work of technologists.”

    I have been thinking of Lawrence’s ideas in a slightly different and I have to admit, less lofty context.  It has to do with the fact that legislators, when they consider regulations and laws, need to focus not just on the law but also on how that legislation will be implemented into code.  In other words, Law is Code.

    Bill Gates once famously said:

    “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

    Passing laws that enable existing ‘things and processes’ – such as efiling, billing etc to be done electronically may only end up magnifying the inefficiency of the existing analogue process if thought isn’t put in as to how that law will be implemented as Code.

    Take billing for example.  We are quite accustomed to receiving a paper bill and paying that bill by mailing a paper cheque.  Now consider if you allow bills to be paid electronically – the paper bill comes to your door and instead of writing a cheque, you pay the bill by transferring funds online.  So far, so good.

    Now ..what if you allow a vendor (in this case a lawyer) to bill electronically?  Well, most lawyers will simply email out a PDF version of a paper bill. You haven’t really improved the underlying process.  What if you went the next step and allowed a vendor to issue bills in true electronic form that can be read directly by a purchaser’s accounting system (machine readable)?  Now that is an improvement that utilizes the efficiency of the technology and truly changes the workflow.

    Problem is – that most laws require lawyers to sign invoices.  How do you sign a truly electronic invoice?  You could apply a digital signature – but most accounting systems are not set up to either apply – or read – such signatures. What happens, at least in BC, is that the lawyer sends out a signed letter stating that they are submitting the electronic invoice (and keeping a signed copy of the pre-bill indicating that they approved the bill in human-readable form before it was sent).

    In this case I submit what is required is a change in the law that reflects that legal billing may be capable of being implemented as Code in a truly electronic process.

    A second example is filing documents in the Land Title Office.  Now today, virtually all basic land registrations in BC can be done electronically (and in fact in most cases must be done so).  The requisite electronic documents are prepared using various applications, typically cloud-based.  They are submitted into the Land Title Office using digital signatures (in BC at least).

    The problem is..the forms have not yet caught up with the fact that lawyers and law offices are automating (ie applying digital workflows) to the land title filing process. For example, if the information to be inserted into a particular form field is too long, then it has to be placed into a Schedule.  The e-forms have been set up as if someone human is filling them in and determining if the text is too long.  Problem is that law firms with large practices would like to set up the document assembly process so that the text is inserted into the forms without the need for the paralegal to stop the process if necessary and then complete the schedule as required when the text exceeds the form field length.  In this case, the law which allows for e-filing (indeed, requires it) needs corresponding Code that fully implements the electronic filing process.

    Law makers of all stripes now need to think in terms of systems and consult with technologists in terms of not only formulating the law but in considering how the law will be implemented.   Where there is a law, that law should be given a hand by technologists in terms of how it will be coded  so that it comes to terms with the (increasingly) digital world in which we all work.

     

     

    This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 7th, 2013 at 4:00 am and is filed under Issues facing Law Firms, Leadership and Strategic Planning, Technology, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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