ECTA: society needs creative lawyers, not ‘skilled’ machines
Lawyers must unlearn some of their adversarial thinking to ensure they play a role in human society in the future, says Mladen Vukmir of the European Communities Trade Mark Association.
Once contemporary society, by the end of the 20th Century, had realised that disputes arise at the moment when communication between the parties breaks down and that the disputants thus hold control over the outcome of their disputes, users of the legal system started having second thoughts on the very role of law.
If the disputants are willing and ready to tackle their lack of communication and re-establish it with the goal of solving their dispute themselves, they may realise that lawyers are, in many instances, not indispensable.
This development has completely changed the rules of the game for the lawyers in private practice and the adjustments have not been easy.
Our legal education is still moulding lawyers with the mindset that might have been useful in the times when recourse to the law was considered the only alternative to violence, making it the vastly superior and preferred solution. However, it is becoming essential that lawyers unlearn a part of their acquired adversarial thinking in order to be perceived as humane and constructive participants in common social projects and as partners to their clients.
It is becoming increasingly clear that lawyers are expected to reform their role in society in order to conform with the changing role of law itself. If we try to imagine the future role of law, one thing is clear—it is not going to go away. Human societies have a tendency to keep earlier formats of social organisation, even when the circumstances change.
Essentially, case law is becoming a burden to the parties. Instead of providing guidance, because our societies are so complex, case law is actually useless. Even if you understand a complex legal decision, it will not provide any guidance because every case is different. Legal consistency is likely to be forgotten because we need to recognise these differences to allow ever more complex societies to freely develop.
The role of software
It seems certain that the profession will see more changes in the immediate future than it has seen over the past 40 years. I expect that, instead of remaining skills-based, our profession will morph into a largely creative profession. The skills part will mostly be taken over by computer systems that will apply and interpret rules.
I also expect a strong role for artificial intelligence (AI) in legislation, where we could stand to gain a more consistent and better tuned set of rules. Human lawyers will be best suited to the role of designers of relations between the social actors and providing input and controlling the computer design.
Lawyers can build justification for their continued professional role in future societies by creatively solving and realigning diverging social interests. Legal tools will remain only a segment of their entire professional landscape.
The world has reached a consensus that only those who innovate can survive in the market. I am certain that the legal profession's future depends on its ability to innovate, but what we call innovation is not true innovation. Inventing new legal services and marketing methods is just responding to the market, rather than true innovation.
Lawyers will have to become creative if they want to survive, particularly if AI is embraced fully. It will become necessary to innovate in a true sense, to assist societies in resolving their frictions in novel ways, which can assist with the prevention and resolution of disputes.
Law, psychology, neurobiology and communications sciences will merge into the prevailing technologies. Lawyers will gain the opportunity to make creative contributions to this process as well as to assist their clients, not with the solutions they have, but with the solutions they will create.
Mladen Vukmir is the first vice president of the European Communities Trade Mark Association (ECTA) and member of the ECTA supervisory board. He is an IMI certified mediator and a past member of the INTA board of directors and the INTA alternative dispute resolution committee. Vukmir has also served as INTA brands and innovation committee chair and past president of the Croatian AIPPI group. He can be contacted at: mladen.vukmir@vukmir.net
You can access the ECTA website here or contact the organisation at: ecta@ecta.org
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