TITLE

The Future of Law. Facing the Challenges of Information Technology

AUTHOR(S) SURNAME, FORENAME

Susskind, Richard

Places & Countries of PUBLISHERS    YEAR
Publication

Oxford, UK        Oxford University Press    1996

PAGES    ISBN        BINDING    PRICE

xvi+309    0-19-826007-5    Hbk    £19.99

Richard Susskind's book has been highly regarded in all the reviews we have noticed in legal publications. We have not noticed any reviews in computer publications but doubtless there are some. With our interest in legal matters we wondered what the attractions were for lawyers in this book. Having been through it (we are rarely able to read the books we review) we can see that Richard Susskind is conveying a marketing message. He has a unique selling proposition with his new legal products for lawyers to sell on the back of information technology. With something of a marketing background we would encourage him.

Applying a computer technical analysis to his writing we can see that he has made the classical error of assigning an identical meaning to the word 'information' when he talks of legal information and information technology. This reaches an extreme

when Richard Susskind refers to "Legal Information Engineers", an expression that we can only regard as a contradiction in terms. The term 'information' has the elephantine quality of everyone knowing what it is but no one having a definition. Our reason for the absence of a definition is infantile, on the basis that a definition cannot be given using the term under definition it becomes impossible to define information without conveying information. It may be that information is one of the few basic assumptions that we have to accept, like the mathematicians' 'point'.

Our major difficulty with Richard Susskind's book, however, is not with his theoretical approach. As a lawyer he is quite entitled to develop a theory of the law, but the technology is rushing ahead faster than the marketplace can absorb the implications. Mention is made of video conferencing. In this batch of reviews will be found mention of Microsoft's Netmeeting product. Using the bandwidth available on the internet all our telephone calls will become video calls with very little additional hardware above that to be found on a standard PC. Richard Susskind also makes mention of project management but only in the context of a lawyer's office. Partly with his advice, Lord Woolf's reforms will give to judges the proactive role in case management already possessed by arbitrators. As arbitrators are now responsible for "adopting procedures ... avoiding unnecessary delay or expense..." and are given the authority to limit the recoverable costs of an arbitration to that end all the parties and the arbitrator must now come under project management control to an extent beyond anything Richard

Susskind anticipated. Project management control is inevitably computer based.

Virtual dispute resolution by email has been tried in the United States but that has been all textual. The law in England is that fee sanctions can be raised against arbitrators who continue with their old paper based ways and oral hearings on account of not avoiding unnecessary delay or expense. The first fee sanction case brought by an aggrieved party against a technological dilatory arbitrator will have an electrifying effect on arbitral dispute resolution. The judges will doubtless follow suit.

The year 1997 is a year of great reforms in the English dispute resolution systems. That large part of the lawyer's work concerned with dispute avoidance will doubtless rush into everything that Richard Susskind tries to anticipate and more. The revolution in manufacturing and business organisation generally will and has extended to services, including the law, and as with all these things it is on the back of the computer or, if you wish, information technology. Our difficulty with the term 'information technology' is that in our recollection it goes back to "The Pickwick, the Owl and the Waverley Pen" and moves on in one smooth continuous stream.

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