It's a complex story that has been a little misinterpreted and simplified.
My concern is that in order to secure regulator approval for this position most of these legal support contractors substantially misrepresent the scope and depth of the work they provide.
Do you have any plans in place to mitigate the risk of crossing the line, and how will that inform your product development plans?
source?
In law, new business models often are in violation, compliance wise, until they make the case that they shouldn't be. If the model is successful & profitable, they fight to change the rules and sometimes end up with a complete or partial victory in that campaign - this is largely a political fight at the bar. If not, they vanish and the lack of regulatory oversight is irrelevant.
Can't give you more than that without going out of bounds.
Reviewing Atrium's legal careers section, they clearly understand the need to monitor the regulatory environment with respect to compliance - see their lead counsel post. That said, I'd counsel justin not to reply to my question if I was advising him.
Now, if they're trying to gin up some "big data" tools, and using Atrium-client data as inputs for those tools, that raises really sticky questions. There would need to be a whole lot of education and disclosure about to clients about AtriumLTS's access to, and use of, the client's information, and the profits generated from that. You just can't monetize lawyer-client relationships like you do in the finance field.
Normally the key battle is in determining if the work in question falls within the definition of the practice of law. The more rote and mindless the work is (say, bates numbering a discovery compilation), the safer it is, but most of the low hanging stuff in this area is already done and most of the new entrants aren't trying to provide new tools in that area.
The big new wave is based on using ML and other tools to search, sort and classify documents for contract management, due diligence, discovery, etc. This is an area where support services already operate. As third parties, these support organizations allow firms to launder responsibility. They can claim that the primary firm is responsible for performing the legal work, which allows them to use non-lawyers to perform the work lawyers would, while simultaneously allowing the primary firm to claim that the searches they perform are defensible and therefore even if mistakes have been made that their efforts were sufficient to discharge their responsibilities.
I am just wondering where this next wave really is going going
At scale, almost no one has a "room." Think about a mortgage bank or cell phone provider, or a car insurance company. Even if they tried to use 'a form', they have to manage hundreds of little details about millions of clients -- based on whatever version of the form was filled out, where they lived, where the product is used, has a deed or title been properly recorded, did the Supreme Court of State X strike down part of your agreement, has anyone sent a written complaint sufficient to trigger the Fair Credit Reporting Act, etc. We've all criticized big lenders who can't come up with proof at a hearing -- but that's because managing that much data is hard. Compliance/contract management software is still growing rapidly.
Second, another wave of tech for lawyers is taking huge databases of publicly-filed contracts, and suggesting clauses in agreements similar to yours. If 80% of compensation contracts filed by publicly traded companies say X, and your deal says Y, you'd like to know that.
So, for our friends at Atrium, whether or not their systems 'practice law,' as long as that product is 'given' by the client's attorney... doesn't that look like it meets the UPL hurdle? (At least at this oversimplified level, IANYL)
With ML-driven autonomous determinations of relevance, however, you're literally doing associate legal work 101, with a system applying skill and judgement to the facts of the matter to make a determination of a legal nature. That's a difference in kind. This becomes doubly interesting, because most of these platforms are cloud hosted, so they're not 'given' by the attorney in the way that a land registry look-up would be after being vetted by a clerk. They're a stand-alone service that functionally makes choices for you.
I have no clue if Atrium is going down that route, but that's where the million dollar cost savings are. Maybe they're just making snazzier client-focused billing software. I've asked before, but no one will tell me what products they're actually working on.
Not saying that what this gent is doing is even remotely as bad (or even really bad at all), but seems they are employing the same mechanism to skirt the regulations a bit.
I helped my buddy, who is an owner of a jury consulting firm, port one of the statistical tables to a ruby model. Here's the code, if you're curious.
https://gist.github.com/zackster/ac3bca42c441f16cbf2b4895fdb...
We wanted to build software to democratize the jury selection process (and bring justice to all, not just those who could afford expensive jury consultants) but the marketing process was kind of challenging and the lawyers we reached out to were unresponsive. Also, jury consultants want to keep this knowledge a trade secret in order to justify their expensive fees despite these statistical tables being available for purchase by anyone who knows where to look.
In large cases, jury consultants have typically been hired to use their intuition, with a scientific-sounding gloss, so the lawyers and corporate managers have someone to blame if something goes wrong. They were famous for proposing questions that were supposed to tip you off to something important, like "Does anyone here regularly fill out a crossword puzzle?" Given the tiny samples, it was difficult to have scientific questions, or to prove that the questions were bunk. (I am less jaded about trial consultants, who deal with argumentation, compared to the 'jury consultant' industry -- which famously gave us Dr. Phil).
In today's mega-cases, the money is spent on rapid profiling of the potential jurors' actual opinions, using their public-facing social media. There's still lots of armchair psychology, but not as much based on bullcrap questions.