I recently commented far too favourably on the the new Law Society Gazette site. There is no way to browse the archives which is frustrating. But to give the site some juice, the opinion sections in particular should be inviting our comments.
I’d have liked, for example, to respond to Clive Wismayer, Solicitor, Great Bookham, who recently penned a Letter to the Editor, from which:
I was interested in Joshua Rozenberg’s article on the doom-laden prognoses of Richard Susskind, who apparently believes that, in future, ‘bespoke’ legal services will be the exception.
With great respect, what utter tosh. …
… legal advice of any quality at all cannot and never will be susceptible [to] standardisation to the required degree.
I for one will not be buying Susskind’s book …
Now, I’m sure Clive is not a Luddite, but he is woefully ill-informed and is certainly in denial. As Susskind says of such naysayers:
Politely, it puzzles me profoundly that lawyers who know little about current and future technologies can be so confident about their inapplicability.
Read the book, Clive.
As an employment lawyer i became interested in the legal reasoning behind judicial decisions in psychiatric injury cases. As i mooched around i became aware of a considerable body of work on artificial inteigence and law. Very few of the researchers were lawyers. The work being done seemed to me interseting and very sophistaicated however few of my lawyer collegues were intersted, had no knowlege but were similarly and i have to say smugly dismisive, despite, or probably because of compete ignorance of the field.