One of the great things about SXSW is that it makes you think outside the box. About issues that aren’t raised instead of the ones that are.
That attribute was on full display for Saturday’s morning Featured Speaker Session. A Session so anticipated that it had people lining up a good two hours before it began. The speaker was Amy Web, the CEO of Future Today Strategy Group and professor at the NYU School of Business. Every year for the last 18 years at SXSW, Web has presented her Groups Emerging Tech Trends Report. It’s a more or less a fixture. The Report has 15 sections centered on tech and industries and is 1,000 pages long. It can be downloaded here for free.
Web and her Group basically consult with companies about the future. They track signals using data. They create models and identify trends. They take what is presently known, combine that with the unknowns, and try to determine is what plausible in future. They then try to take those possibilities and create strategies to deal with what could happen. One of the themes this year was based on a quote from Lenin: “There are weeks when decades happen.” Meaning, the rate of change is so fast that keeping up with it and creating strategies to deal with should be paramount. But it’s often not.
Without getting hung up too much on the developments she predicted, for Legal, the most important thing in my view is it’s the mindset that should be used to deal with change and the questions that need to be asked. The question, said Web, is not what will we create in future? The right question is what will our creations do, how will they impact us as humans. Web’s thesis is our technology is in many ways rewriting our long-held rules of reality. The rules by which we operate are breaking down It’s true for society and it’s true for Legal.
The Predictions
But first, Web’s predictions. Web had several developments that she thinks are going to impact the world over then next year or two:
- The merger between AI and new ways to inject data.
- Multi-agent systems and platforms working together as teams that are more powerful than single platforms.
- AI combining and being used with biology.
- Biology engaging sensors to enhance the data for AI.
- Microscopic machines will give us power over nature.
- AI systems that interact with physical world.
From these developments, Web talked about such things as rice made with cow genes that is both a carbohydrate and a protein, use of rhinoceros skins instead of steel for car bodies, pigs growing human teeth, batteries than convert energy like humans, computers that can connect to our brains, buildings composed of smart materials, sperm bots and wearables inside the body as therapeutic tools. All these and more will happen in the near future, says Web. But again, that’s not the point.
The Stone in the Shoe
Web offered an interesting analogy to how most of us and businesses make decisions with respect to technology and change. She asked us to imagine that on the way to the keynote we got a stone in our shoe. When we get a stone in our shoe, we concentrate on that stone and how irritating it is to us. When we do that, we miss what’s going on around us. The stone in the shoe is a major distraction
The stone is shoe effect, said Web, explains how we often get where we are that seems to show such a lack of planning and forethought. It explains how leaders make bad decisions when faced with change. The stone in shoe distraction causes cognitive impairment. Our attention keeps getting pulled back to discomfort and takes away our mental bandwidth that should be used for higher strategic thinking. It explains why CEOs react to events instead of planning for them. Why we are fearful of what the future could bring.
Today, that stone among other things is AI. Tomorrow, it will be among the variety of the developments that Web outlined. But the problem, of course, says Webb, is that we cant take our stone out.
The Stone in the Legal Shoes
This analogy is particularly applicable to Legal. Lawyers are predisposed by training and experience to be skeptical. Legal does not like change. Legal does not do change very well. More than most businesses and professions, Legal myopically focus on the stones.
What are Legal’s stones? Legal professionals rightfully focus on ethics. But in doing so, they fail to look for and see what technology can do. When it comes to Gen AI, they focus on hallucinations instead of focusing on the need to read the cases that a Gen AI tool might uncover. They focus on the billable hour model when instead technology dictates they need to focus on value to the client. They focus on the problem of finding talent instead of making work conditions attractive to the talent pool. They focus on the inability to conveniently corral associates and force them into the office instead of looking at how to promote social connective resolutions. Law firms all too often bemoan the problems that technology poses for them instead of how to prepare for and manage change.
Law firms that fixate on obstacles instead of anticipate that change will happen will lose the ability to shape will lose the ability to shape the future.
What If?
Much of Web’s talk was about asking the right questions when it comes to change. While much of the tech she discusses is indeed mind blowing, it’s still all about asking the right question. Asking the right question provides the framework for dealing with a rapidly changing future.
Part of her Group’s analysis therefore involves asking a series of what-if questions that are often not asked. What if, for example, we could use AI to do certain tasks and how would that impact.
She gave some examples of what-if questions: what if one of the AI agents in a multi AI system goes rogue? Or what if a boss asks its employees to have a chip implanted in their body to better monitor them?
Law firms and in-house legal professionals also need to ask the tough what-if questions when it comes to the impact of technology and innovation. Like:
- What if we didn’t need a leverage model to be profitable?
- What if an AI bot could competently do legal research and write workmanlike briefs?
- What if the Big 4 accounting firms begin to offer legal services better, faster, and more economically?
- What if the lateral market creates lawyers that are free agents who come together on certain projects or clients?
- What if the law firm business model itself is a dinosaur?
- What if AI can better decide disputes than a human judge?
- What if AI bots become able to provide affordable legal services to those who currently lack access? What would that mean for the profession? For society?
Asking these what-if questions can guide the profession for the future. These kinds of questions would enable law firms and in-house legal to better prepare for and proactively impact the future.
But there is another more troubling and impactful what-if question with which the legal profession is faced.
The Ultimate What If
On a broader front, there is little question that things like technology, social media, deep fakes, and the availability of any and all information from anywhere and everywhere — good or bad — have enabled things to happen that we never thought would. And we see that now with attacks on the judiciary, with the legitimate fear that court rulings will be ignored and with a growing disrespect of judges, lawyers, and the rule of law. So, what if the rule of law is no longer respected or honored? Where does that leave us as a profession? Where does that leave us as a society?
Asking this question enables us as a profession to see the impact of where we are and where we may be going. It’s not a future most of us want. But if we don’t ask the question, we cant know the urgency with which to act. Web says if we don’t intervene, we will lose the ability to effect the future: “Possibilities come with responsibilities.”
The Bigger Picture: Why This Urgently Matters
The problem, says Web, is that technology is advancing so significantly that society no longer is subject to the rules that we currently understand. As a result, how decisions are being made could set us up for serious problems if we don’t focus on the bigger picture instead of the stones in our shoes. If we don’t ask the hard what-if questions that demonstrate what would, could, and probably will happen if we don’t intervene. As Web put it, “We have to have conversations that challenge current beliefs.”
It’s true for businesses. It’s true for society. And it’s true for lawyers and the legal profession.
Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law