Ben Turner | DLES Fall 2022

Since starting law school, I have been particularly interested in the “structure” of the law. By structure, I mean the kind of imagined scaffolding of legal information and knowledge, whether in the academy, the profession, in business or beyond. Whether in flowcharting our apps’ processes, mindmapping legal topics in preparing for a final or even just doodling what I think court structures are, I keep coming back to thinking about how we have the structures we do. Our class together in DLES has made me question some of my underlying beliefs (and even some myths) about what law is, what it ought to be and how we might be a part of bridging the two.

In preparing work for another commitment, I came across an article from The Advocates’ Quarterly called “Legal Research, Legal Reasoning and Precedent in Canada in the Digital Age” by Jonathan de Vries. What struck me about the article was the author’s observation of some of the structural differences in case reporting between Canada, the United States and England, especially as this process has transitioned into the digital age. Core to de Vries’ analysis is a concept that I have been somewhat obsessed with for a number of years, which is a kind of McLuhan-esque “the medium is the message” – the ways in which we think and talk about and perhaps even practice the law are informed by the structures in which we operate. To somewhat bastardize de Vries’ points, I was lit up by the idea that how we report and distribute caselaw is deeply a part of how we think about and use caselaw, and in turn form the law itself. In a recent research series talk, Professor Chambers discussed how tools like CanLII and AustLII were essential in his work writing large books on broad areas of law, and that he simply could not have written some of his books if he were researching in the “old way”. De Vries also articulates a broader possibility in terms of how access to caselaw could inform trends in judicial decision-making. For instance, “The increased volume of case law made available by the digital system also has the potential to alter the idea of precedent.”[1] In other words, by having a resource like CanLII to draw upon countless cases, the very means by which “lawyering” is done changes. With near-instant and boundless access to caselaw, lawyers can stockpile decisions that align with their clients’ interests, judges have to consume and process so much more information and we all have to adapt to how the law shifts and changes.

Separately, but relatedly, I have seen a lot of parallels Sarah Sutherland’s mapping out of the ways in which legal information can be better understood, codified and put to use in her book Legal Data and Information in Practice: How Data and the Law Interact. Her taxonomizing different forms of legal data, especially across not just the common law, but also other large swaths of the world, feels like a further expansion of the possibilities of a more technologically informed approach to law.

Part of the core thesis of Designing Legal Expert Systems that spoke to me was Professor Sykes’ challenging some of those base assumptions many of us have about law and legal education. Who’s to say that lawyers can’t build or design legal applications? Do we not owe it to our clients, firms, organizations or even our fellow citizens to innovate and push the envelope when it comes to giving access to legal information or advice? In building out our app, I feel this sense of pride that our team (and the other teams, too!) are wrestling the law into a digestible, sensible form – we’re giving structure to something that wouldn’t otherwise have it, for those that wouldn’t otherwise be able to access it.

Without getting too “meta”, it took me stepping outside of our DLES class to realize how important these challenges to preconceived notions of the legal system are to my own values and beliefs, and that I want to be a part of helping change the legal profession to be a more innovative, dynamic and welcoming environment, no matter what the “structure”.

[1] Jonathan de Vries, “Legal Research, Legal Reasoning and Precedent in Canada in the Digital Age” (2018) 48:1 Advoc Q 1, page 21