Innovation and technological developments play an increasing role in all sectors, including law. New technologies offer opportunities and make time-consuming paperwork increasingly a thing of the past. Evert Stamhuis, professor of Law and Innovation at Erasmus School of Law, explains the influence of technological development in law to Advocatie and argues for teaching legal tech properly to students.
Technologies such as text recognition and ever smarter search engines are making the life of the 21st -century lawyer much easier. Legal Tech can increasingly replace boring and routine work and will only play a greater role in the legal industry. Still, according to Stamhuis, lawyers need not fear being replaced by a machine: "There are all kinds of other components to legal work that technology cannot improve in the next 50 years, that's where machines would only mean decline."
"[Legal tech] can make some things of the job easier, but it could also give time to do certain things that lawyers now have too little time to do better," Stamhuis continued. "Listening carefully to your client, spending more time in a negotiation meeting with your opposing party. Removing that time pressure would not mean that the lawyer is out of work, he is just going to do other things."
Precisely because legal tech is changing the role of the lawyer and has an increasing influence on the law, it is important for law students to become extensively acquainted with technology, Stamhuis believes: "The knowledge that a lawyer needs to have is much more readily available in the cloud. However, you still see the nineteenth-century image of the lawyer as a source of knowledge a lot in legal education, when students sit fiddling with such a printed law book. Of course there are many good arguments for it, but at the same time it is outdated."
Adequate attention must already be paid to the use of technology during training, says Stamhuis: "It is important that students see the possibilities and opportunities of developments. (...) We teach students to work with the various platforms, and how to evaluate them. For example, how the choice of a particular search platform affects the results - objective or otherwise - you get."
Today's law students are the law writers of the future, which is precisely why a basic knowledge of technological innovation is essential, concludes the Professor of Law and Innovation: "I think it's important that students understand what's basically happening at the back end of those systems. You already see that, in departments where automated implementation practice plays a major role, the writing of a legal text is completely adapted to this. Lawyers are asked: create a legal source that is suitable for automation. You can only do that if you have some understanding of that automated practice."
