It’s hard enough to get lawyers to agree about things happening right now. Getting them to agree about the future? That’s impossible. So it’s no surprise that there were many different views of the future at Stanford’s FutureLaw Conference. The event, hosted by the “CodeX” Center for Legal Informatics, brought together a broad mix of legal, technology, business, academic and finance people for a busy day of future-gazing. What follows is my personal take on the conference highlights and some impressions on where there was (or wasn’t) consensus. For another perspective, you can read Tim Hwang’s take on the “Stanford Consensus” here.

1. We are living through a Legal Revolution.

2. Machines and robots are going to steal some legal jobs.

3. For the foreseeable future, humans will outperform robots at certain tasks, like contract negotiation and high stakes litigation.

4. Legal consumers and legal service innovators have a shared interest in the establishment of objective standards for measuring performance and value.

5. Like every other industry facing “big data” problems, visualization tools will become increasingly important features of modern legal systems.

6. Post-revolutionary lawyers will need better technical and entrepreneurial skills to survive in a post-revolutionary legal market, and law schools will need to adapt to survive.

7. The regulatory monopoly on the “practice of law” is probably the last wall standing between today’s legal market and the post-revolutionary legal market.

Based on all this, what should you be doing?

If you’re a law firm, this is still a time of great opportunity. The technology to support innovative services is out there, and there are still plenty of markets where first movers could dominate with highly scalable, highly profitable offerings. But wait too long, and someone else will eat your lunch.

If you’re a law student, it’s time to make a choice. Do you want to be an old-school lawyer in a top tier firm (in which case, you’d better be a star performer), or do you want to become a player in the revolution, where you leverage both legal and other skills to design and build tomorrow’s robo-lawyer solutions (in which case, you’d better diversify your knowledge beyond the rule against perpetuities)?

Whoever you are, it’s a time to keep your eyes and ears open. Ignoring a revolution won’t make it go away.

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Tags: Center for Legal Informatics, Legal Market, Revolutionary Mutterings, Stanford