The Reset Moment
摘要
Artificial Intelligence (AI)—especially generative AI—has an enormous potential to revolutionize the legal ecosystem. It will change how lawyers work, yet also challenges traditional legal roles and practices. It has the potential to democratize legal services by making them more accessible and efficient, but it might also just create a new avenue to generate revenue in a highly commercialized private legal sector. It creates the opportunity for much faster transactions, but it bears the immediate risk for the judicial system to fall ever more behind. As we add digital ‘steroids’ (aka generative AI) to the legal ecosystem, we must … The legal profession has already struggled for a long time to adapt to societal needs, to address issues like access to justice gap (an estimated 5 billion people have unmet justice needs globally, including people who cannot obtain justice for everyday problems, people who are excluded from the opportunity the law provides, and people who live in extreme conditions of injustice; for more details see the worldjusticeproject website) , ethical breaches, and to confront the byproduct of such shortfalls: the erosion of public trust in law. It has been too resistant to listen to the calls for a reevaluation of its role in society. Based on that analysis, we must take stock and realize, that we do not face yet another phase of organic evolution in the legal ecosystem, but rather a ‘reset moment’. The crucial question we inevitably must answer is: Do we let the commercial legal market own the programming of the new setup risking that the commercialization, the ‘pay-to-play’ in the legal ecosystem gets scaled—or do we find both, the self-reflection, the willingness and the appropriate means to reset with a clear vision of rebuilding and sustaining the Rule of Law, using the commercial levers in a positive way? For the analysis, the discourse and ultimately the plan of action we have to reconsider what the Rule of Law requires. In principle we, the ever more diverse community in Law, needs to have … How do we seize the Reset Moment?