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Legal Tech, Civil Procedure, and the Future of Adversarialism

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Legal Tech, Civil Procedure, and the Future of Adversarialism ARTICLE LEGAL TECH, CIVIL PROCEDURE, AND THE FUTURE OF ADVERSARIALISM DAVID FREEMAN ENGSTROM† & JONAH B. GELBACH† “Legal tech” is transforming litigation and law practice, and its steady advance has tapped a rich vein of anxiety about the future of the legal profession. Much of the resulting debate narrowly focuses on what legal tech portends for the professional authority, and profitability, of lawyers. It is also profoundly futurist, full of references to “robolawyers” and “robojudges.” Lost in this rush to foretell the future of lawyers and their robotic replacements is what should be an equally important, and also more immediate, concern: What effect will legal tech’s continued advance have on core features of our civil justice system and, in particular, the procedural rules that structure it? Tackling that question, this Article seeks to enrich—and, in places, reorient—the budding debate about legal tech’s implications for law and litigation by zeroing in on the near- to medium-term, not out at a distant, hazy horizon. It does so via three case studies, each one exploring how specific legal tech tools (e-discovery tools, outcome- prediction tools, and tools that perform advanced legal analytics) might alter litigation for good and ill by shifting the distribution of costs and information within the system. Each case study then traces how a concrete set of civil procedure rules—from Twombly/Iqbal’s pleading standard and the work product doctrine to rules and doctrines that govern forum-shopping—can, or should, adapt in response. When these assorted dynamics are lined up and viewed together, it is not a stretch to suggest that legal tech will remake the adversarial system, not by replacing lawyers and judges with robots, but rather by unsettling, and even resetting, several of the system’s procedural cornerstones. The challenge for courts—and, in time, for rulemakers and legislators— † Professor of Law and Associate Dean, Stanford Law School. Both authors thank Alex Evelson, Elena Goldstein, Reed Sawyers, and Liza Starr for excellent research assistance and participants at the Fifth Annual Civil Procedure Workshop at the University of Texas School of Law, the panel on The Future of Legal Tech, Civil Procedure, and the Adversarial System at the #"!$ CodeX FutureLaw Conference, and the CodeX Fall Lunchtime Speaker Series for helpful conversations. † Professor of Law, Berkeley Law School. (!""!) !""# University of Pennsylvania Law Review [Vol. !$%: !""! will be how best to adapt a digitized litigation system using civil procedure rules built for a very different, analog era. This Article aims to jumpstart thinking about that process by identifying the principal ways that legal tech will reshape “our adversarialism” and mapping a reform and research agenda going forward. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................... !""# I. THE LEGAL TECH LANDSCAPE .............................................. !""& A. Flavors of Legal Tech ................................................................ !""% B. Technical Limits and the Trajectory Puzzle ................................ !"!& C. Implications ............................................................................. !"'" !. Legal Tech and the Legal Profession .................................. !"'! #. Legal Tech and Rule of Law ............................................. !"'( '. Legal Tech and Distribution ............................................. !"') II. LEGAL TECH AND CIVIL PROCEDURE: THREE CASE STUDIES . !"*! A. Predictive Coding, Proportionality, and Plausibility Pleading ........... !"*# !. The New World of Discovery ........................................... !"*' #. Proportionality’s Retreat in a Frictionless World ................ !"(! '. Re-Centering Twombly and Iqbal ....................................... !"($ B. Predictive Analytics and Forum Selection ..................................... !"(% !. Forum-Shopping in Federal Courts and the Promise of Predictive Analytics .......................................................... !"$" #. Will Predictive Forum Selection “Work”? ......................... !"$# '. The Future of Forum Selection and Civil Procedure .......... !"$& C. From Borrowed Wits to Borrowed Bits: Legal Tech and the Work Product Doctrine ....................................................................... !")! !. Information and Adversarialism: Reframing Legal Tech’s Distributive Costs ............................................................ !")# #. Hickman’s Work Product Bargain ....................................... !")) '. Work Product for a Digital Age ........................................ !"&" III. LEGAL TECH AND “OUR ADVERSARIALISM” ........................... !"&$ A. An IP for Civil Procedure .......................................................... !"&) B. Legal Tech and the German (Dis)Advantage ................................ !"%# CONCLUSION .............................................................................. !"%% INTRODUCTION “Legal tech,” most agree, is transforming litigation and law practice, and its steady advance has tapped a rich vein of anxiety about the future of the #"#!] Legal Tech, Civil Procedure, and the Future of Adversarialism !""' legal profession.1 Is law like a driverless car, or is it irreducibly complex and grounded in dynamic human judgment? How to square online dispute resolution and automated legal advice with rules governing unauthorized practice of law? Can BigLaw survive? Much of this has a profession-centered and even defensive quality in its narrow focus on what legal tech portends for the professional authority and pro+tability of lawyers. Much of it is also profoundly futurist—full of prophecies of “robolawyers,”2 “robojudges,”3 or 1 See, e.g., BENJAMIN H. BARTON, GLASS HALF FULL: THE DECLINE AND REBIRTH OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION (#"!%); RICHARD SUSSKIND, TOMORROW’S LAWYERS: AN INTRODUCTION TO YOUR FUTURE (#"!&); RICHARD SUSSKIND & DANIEL SUSSKIND, THE FUTURE OF THE PROFESSIONS: HOW TECHNOLOGY WILL TRANSFORM THE WORK OF HUMAN EXPERTS (#"!%); Daniel Martin Katz, Quantitative Legal Prediction—or—How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Preparing for the Data-Driven Future of the Legal Services Industry, '# EMORY L.J. $"$ (#"!&); John O. McGinnis & Russell G. Pearce, The Great Disruption: How Machine Intelligence Will Transform the Role of Lawyers in the Delivery of Legal Services, (# FORDHAM L. REV. &")! (#"!)); Dana Remus & Frank Levy, Can Robots Be Lawyers?: Computers, Lawyers, and the Practice of Law, &" GEO. J. LEGAL ETHICS %"! (#"!*); Tanina Rostain, Robots versus Lawyers: A User- Centered Approach, &" GEO. J. LEGAL ETHICS %%$ (#"!*); Eric L. Talley, Is the Future of Law a Driverless Car?: Assessing How the Data Analytics Revolution Will Transform Legal Practice, !*) J. INST. & THEORETICAL ECON. !(& (#"!(); David C. Vladeck, Machines Without Principals: Liability Rules and Artificial Intelligence, ($ WASH. L. REV. !!* (#"!)); Bruce H. Kobayashi and Larry E. Ribstein, Law’s Information Revolution, %& ARIZ. L. REV. !!'$ (#"!!); William D. Henderson, A Blueprint for Change, )" PEPP. L. REV. )'! (#"!&). For treatments in the popular and lawyer-trade presses, see Mark A. Cohen, ‘Legal Innovation’ Is Not an Oxymoron—It’s Further Along Than You Think, FORBES (Mar. !), #"!*, (:%$ AM), https://www.forbes.com/sites/markcohen!/#"!*/"&/!)/ legal-innovation-is-not-an-oxymoron-its-farther-along-than-you-think [https://perma.cc/(%TT-XZY)]; Jason Koebler, Rise of the Robolawyers, ATLANTIC, Apr. #"!*, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ #"!*/")/rise-of-the-robolawyers/%!**$) [https://perma.cc/QN(P-NLK)]; Steve Lohr, AI Is Doing Legal Work. But It Won’t Replace Lawyers, Yet., N.Y. TIMES (Mar. !$, #"!*), https://www.nytimes.com/#"!*/"&/!$/ technology/lawyers-artificial-intelligence.html [https://perma.cc/Z*ZX-V&WB]; John Markoff, Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software, N.Y. TIMES (Mar. ), #"!!), https://www.nytimes.com/ #"!!/"&/"%/science/"%legal.html [https://perma.cc/JD)T-JK&B]; Debra Cassens Weiss, Will Technology Create a Lawyer ‘Jobs-Pocalypse’? Doomsayers Overstate Impact, Study Says, A.B.A. J. (Jan. %, #"!', ':)% AM), http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/does_technology_presage_a_lawyer_jobs_pocalypse_naysayers_ove rstate_impact [https://perma.cc/&'AT-R*L&]; John G. Browning, Will Robot Lawyers Take Our Jobs?, D CEO MAG., Mar. #"!$, https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-ceo/#"!$/march/will-robot-lawyers-take-our- jobs [https://perma.cc/W'EZ-A)Q$]. 2 See, e.g., Asa Fitch, Would You Trust a Lawyer Bot with Your Legal Needs?, WALL. ST. J. (Aug. !", #"#", !":"" AM), https://www.wsj.com/articles/would-you-trust-a-lawyer-bot-with-your-legal- needs-!!%$*"'(")# [https://perma.cc/*#LX-B*#J]; Gary Marchant & Josh Covey, Robo-Lawyers: Your New Best Friend or Your Worst Nightmare?, LITIGATION, Fall #"!(, at #*; Koebler, supra note !. Not everyone is so con+dent. See Milan Markovic, Rise of the Robot Lawyers?, '! ARIZ. L. REV. &#%, &#% (#"!$) (challenging the notion that lawyers will be displaced by arti+cial intelligence). 3 The literature that predicts or otherwise assumes a future populated by robojudges is growing fast. See, e.g., Eugene Volokh, Chief Justice Robots, '( DUKE L.J. !!&% (#"!$) (predicting a future with robot judges); Aziz Z. Huq, A Right to a Human Decision, !"' VA. L. REV. '!! (#"#") (same); Frank Pasquale, A Rule of Persons, Not Machines: The Limits of Legal Automation, (* GEO. WASH. L. REV. ! (#"!$)
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