Peer to Peer Magazine

36 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SUMMER 2016 EXTRAS Practicing from Space: Lawyers of the Future In spite of the Internet, iPhones and instant access to almost every piece of information ever created by humans, I have to admit I am a little disappointed in the future. Where is the mechanical dream world Walt Disney and the Jetsons told us we would have? by Larry Port of Rocket Maer Practicing from Space: Lawyers of the Future However, things are picking up. A disappointed futurist like me owes a debt of gratitude to Elon Musk. With reusable rockets from SpaceX, incredibly cool cars at Tesla Motors and human transport at 700 mph through the Hyperloop, he is single- handedly dragging us toward the future's future. A futurist is only as good as his vision, and the good people at ILTA requested that I opine on the future for lawyers. I retreated to the mountains of Pennsylvania and, with the aid of a steaming goblet of Ayahuasca, I have foreseen the following: Lawyers will be able to practice from space. Commercial spaceflight will happen in the next 10 years, if not sooner. For a cool couple hundred grand, you can book a flight on Virgin Galactic. If your spaceship makes it safely back to Earth, you can boast to your friends about your suborbital flight and five minutes of weightlessness. This exciting development means some lawyer somewhere will be the first to practice law from space. That person could be you. It would be worth taking one of your five weightless minutes to review a contract if it meant taking a giant leap forward for lawyerkind. Mobile time tracking applications make this scenario entirely possible. Lawyers will have robots as clients. We are so close to the singularity I almost can feel it, like the pinch of metal claws grabbing my skull. Singularity is the idea that once machine intelligence eclipses biological intelligence, machines will become exponentially smarter and technology will increase at a rate humans cannot comprehend. When this happens robots will become players in the system. They will engage with us in society and get ripped off, suffer abuse and injustice, and otherwise experience the cruel world as we know it. Optimistically, robots will not react by obliterating us as a species but will instead seek remedy via the justice system. As with space, the opportunity to make history is real: You might be the first person to represent a robot in a court of law. Lawyers will travel by jetpack and consume food pills. We have not seen daily use of jetpacks and food pills yet, but I still hold out hope. The people who made the Jetsons had to have known something. No other profession would benefit more from jetpacks and food pill consumption than legal services. No one is more pressed for time and has to travel so much. Imagine skipping traffic and flying over to the courthouse. This would be an especially tantalizing development for personal injury lawyers, as many of us will get seriously maimed flying around in our jetpacks. And picture how great it would be if, at the deposition or mediator office, instead of munching on pretzels or granola bars, you could eat a four-course meal in the form of a pill. Now THAT would be progress. Lawyers will be able to invoice telepathically. Tracking time is a pain; so is invoicing. No maer how streamlined and optimized we make it, billing still takes time and, more important, keeps lawyers from performing client work. Imagine if you could think "0.1 hours to maer xyz." Telepathy is years off, but there is room for incremental steps forward with voice interfaces. The next five years will herald a new era of human-computer integration. If you are not utilizing Siri or have not seen what the Amazon Echo is doing, you are missing out on one of the most rapidly changing aspects of modern computing. You might think my visions are ridiculous, but when you are a space lawyer defending robots while on your jetpack, feel free to send me an apology telepathically. P2P 1 2 3 4

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