Tim Hwang of the University of California Berkeley School of Law has been profiled by Fast Company, the entrepreneurship magazine, in an article by Adam Bluestein entitled Tim Hwang Isn’t A Lawyer, But He Plays One Online (Fast Company, 3 May 2012).
In the article, Tim comments on legal technology innovation, including his own projects. Here are some excerpts:
I’m working on a toolkit that allows people to use computer code to program the behavior of corporations in the same way that you can program robots. To toolkit can cause a legal entity to generate subsidiaries, transfer assets, close down, and so on. [...]
One thing that got me intrigued about law was that industry-wide it has the same kind of structure as older industries that have been disrupted by technology: a small class of people that’s based on control of information, protected by regulations. Law hasn’t had its Napster moment yet [...]
The idea of Robot Robot & Hwang is to experiment with computers and legal code to disrupt the norms of the industry and give way to something better and more innovative. I have in mind a different approach that brings the kind of big-data analysis we see being applied elsewhere to the law. An example of this is a company called Lex Machina, which does data mining on judges’ records and makes quantitative predictions about what they will do in the future. That sort of stuff is really powerful. It takes the responsibilities and talents attributed to lawyers and gives them to someone else as well. Also, the way forms are done now tend to be pretty flat–with online services you’re mostly just paying for PDF documents, but if it’s, say, a municipal complaint, you could add a tool to file it directly, in a really a simple way.
For more information, please see the complete article.
Please join me in congratulating Tim!
Tags: Fast Company, Innovation in legal information systems, Innovation in legal technology, Legal technology innovation, Lex Machina, Robot Robot and Hwang, Tim Hwang
