"I realise that some of my criticisms may be mistaken; but to refuse to criticize judgements for fear of being mistaken is to abandon criticism altogether... If any of my criticisms are found to be correct, the cause is served; and if any are found to be incorrect the very process of finding out my mistakes must lead to the discovery of the right reasons, or better reasons than I have been able to give, and the cause is served just as well."

-Mr. HM Seervai, Preface to the 1st ed., Constitutional Law of India.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Gillian Hadfield, Law for a Flat World: Legal Infrastructure and the New Economy



Gillian Hadfield has written an excellent article on the discordance between the nature of legal services  and the demands from the industry. Though Hadfield seeks to establish a broader thesis, his arguments mainly stem from the expectations of corporate clients vis-à-vis the law industry. It makes sense for Hadfield to adopt this approach because one would expect the industry to invest lots of money for receiving legal services. His Her thesis is simple: There has been a substantial shift in the nature of economic activity and the law industry has not kept up with the demands of this new economic order. The primary complaint is that knowledge, language and the culture of the law industry is that of law and not that of business. This “DNA gap” begins right from the law school.
The article is worth checking out.The abstract is as below:


In the last two decades, the economy has undergone fundamental transformation with the twin structural changes of a great increase in the size of global markets and the internet-driven development of a platform for global exchange and work processes. These changes have transformed the economic demand for law: the demand for legal inputs that will support the creation of value in economic relationships. Not merely the quantity but the type of legal inputs required by the new economy is significantly different from those required by the old economy. The economic demand for law in the new economy requires support for the much higher rates at which economic relationships now cross both firm and jurisdictional boundaries, the more rapid depreciation of legal solutions, the increased differentiation of legal problems, the reduced tolerance for legal transaction costs created by high velocity and global competition, and a greater need for integration of business and legal expertise in order to engage in the relatively constant innovative problem-solving that the new economy requires. In this paper I argue that our legal infrastructure - the socially available set of legal materials that economic actors can use to help govern relationships - has not kept up with this transformation in the economic demand for law. Empirical evidence for this claim includes the increasing levels of dissatisfaction in even the most elite corporate legal markets, the unprecedented impact of the Great Recession of 2009 on large law firms, and surveys and interviews conducted with corporate counsel. The primary basis for the claim of a mismatch, however, is theoretical: the attributes of our existing legal infrastructure - a heavy reliance on densely-worded and complex statutes, regulations and contracts; human-capital-intensive craft production methods; undiversified legal business models; almost exclusive reliance on mandatory legal rules imposed by public actors - are poorly suited to the nature of economic activity in the new economy. The reason our legal infrastructure has not adapted, I argue, is attributable to an even deeper level of legal infrastructure: the severe limitations on who may produce legal rules and other legal inputs (such as advice, document templates, norms and practices) imposed by our continued reliance on publicly produced rules and the excessively closed nature of our lawyer- and judge-controlled legal markets.

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