Is the Common Legal Platform a Wicked Problem?

Abstract

This chapter addresses the challenge of a common legal platform (CLP) from the perspective of Legal Design. The chapter will give the reader an overview of the Legal Design method and show the advantages and suitability of this methodical approach to tackle the challenge of the CLP. The authors explore the topic of this book from a key principle of human-centered design the—so called—“wicked problems”, providing a theoretical framework to understand wicked problems in the context of design thinking and creative problem-solving. In the second part of the chapter, we offer a case study of Design Thinking applied to the challenge of the CLP. The case study provides insights from the field research conducted as part of an 8 weeks long Design Thinking project carried out in a partnership between the Liquid Legal Institute and the School of Design Thinking at the Hasso Plattner Institute. Because of the complex nature of the problem addressed, this chapter does not try to provide answers but rather aims to better articulate which are the relevant questions to frame the problem of a common legal platform.

Appendix

Lawyer working in a Law firm	Standardization and collaboration help only the clients, not the lawyers
	The only reason to share is money
	If you have the formula to win the jackpot each time, would you share it?
	Maybe there is another starting point: Accumulate already existing information and data that is not commercially significant—like NDAs
	There is a big difference between specialized law and simple judicial questions (e.g. flight right) and B2B vs B2C
	To build a good contract it needs a negotiation process in which lawyers aim to outsmart the opposing side
	The biggest risk for law firms in standardization are major enterprises
	Lawyers only cost money—they do not gain it
	80% of the everyday work of a lawyer is Document Layout and Contract Designing
Legal professional association Bundesnotarkammer	Collaboration is not happening because of the “Partner structure”
	Lawyers like to be special & be known for it
	Insurance Problem: Liability Insurance ends when the lawyer relies on false information
	The concept of ownership is important to show knowledge—prestige
	In the legal world, you blame yourself if you ask your colleagues or others for help
	Payment in Law Firms depends on “working-time”, not on performance
	Even if you share knowledge, it doesn‘t mean that it will be used
	Working faster means less money—this leads to less profit. (billable hour principle)
Lawyer working in a law firm	We claim for internal standardization. An external standardization is very hard to imagine
	“Monkeywork” is the main part of the first-year education of a young lawyer in a law firm
	Legal techs are pressuring us and the law firms to rethink and collaborate
	50% of the day I review documents and do not focus on anything else
	Often collaboration is even more complex than working alone because for collaboration you need to have fixed settings and standards already implemented
	Even though there are some templates, you still need a lot of time to put them into one document
	We get templates from Beck-online for example
	The german legal world focuses more on individual work
Translator for judicial text at a Court of Justice	I use a lot of templates from my translation books (Beck Verlag)
	We have the “Bundesverband der Übersetzer”, where we network, work on a database of all translators, do lobby work and quality check
	Database exchange is possible, but only for large projects and exceptions
	We have a translation software that intellectually adjusts per customer over time hand per translations
	I am not sharing my own templates with other colleagues. It just doesn‘t make sense for me. I paid for these templates with time and money
	I don‘t have a judicial liability!
Legaltech Company	As a legal service provider, we are not allowed to appear for our clients in court—we pass those cases to law firms
	We use an automatic API to transfer cases to our lawyers
	Many legal techs are no competition for lawyers as they fill out the needs that traditional lawyers cannot fulfill
	In Germany, we need physical signatures in front of the court. In France, this is not needed
	Many old politicians do not understand the need for more modern laws
	We need to create a better understanding of where technology can support the legal world
	The bar is not interested in new things
Clerk at a Law firm	We have word templates on shared servers. Lawyers outside of law firms are difficult, as the identity of the client has to be protected
	If lawyers would share everything, their business model would erode.
	Many verdicts do not get published online and are only available in the archives.
	Many publications are hidden behind paywalls.
	A digital database for verdicts would make my life a lot easier.
	As a lawyer, I do have surprisingly little to do with the people I work for.
Legal tech founder	Some information we are happy to share with other players, for example, trained models
	From personal experience, I know that sharing in law firms is very unstructured and ad-hoc
	We collaborate with other legal techs that have complementary products
	Standardized clauses would make my life a lot easier
	We need data to train our algorithms
	Many contracts are only digitized as scans of physical contracts
	Out of the business perspective, data protection is a big hurdle for contract automatization
	Lawyers and law firms do not want to share because they want to protect their USP
Lawyer and author. Works in a Law Firm	A way to auto-check clauses for standard conformity would change a lot for me
	I need to spend at least 80% of my working time on clients
	You don‘t change the system by convincing people but through the extinction of the dinosaurs
	Lots of time is wasted on editing contracts
	Office 365 would already be big progress
	Because of time pressure, everyone loves their own template
	I have to submit my documents by mail or fax when I go to court. Grauenhaft!
	The German justice system could learn a lot from the USA when it comes to Digitalization
	There are many mistakes in contracts because of time pressure
Innovations-management DIN e.V.	DIN gathers different stakeholders in an ecosystem and functions as their neutral and independent mediator and coordinator
	One possibility would be to use DIN to bring different stakeholders together to see what is necessary and what is possible using a format of ours called DIN-Spec
	Depending on the size of the event it could be done within 6 weeks of finalizing a program
	One example would be our work with Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Bosch on a new norm for AI
Professor of Law	Standards in law include two realms: (1) the rules and (2) the facts and parameters and how the rules are interpreted with regards to them. The second realm is the tricky one that cannot really be standardized or automated
	Tax law and social law is theoretically standardizable
	There are too many island solutions
	What we need is a broad, open-source solution. In a sense a wiki of digital standards
Founder of a Legal Design Consultancy	Legal tech is a common mission, the scene is very family-like
	Many law firms have a huge problem in finding young associates
	It’s difficult to find people who are both lawyers and tech-affine
	Doing something besides your law studies evokes skepticism and incomprehension among your fellow students