Cyborg Lawyers Book Reviews

Cyborg Lawyers by Kevin Rhodes Book Summary

This second collection of Kevin’s blog posts for The Now of Law and the Colorado Bar Association’s Legal Connection ezine focuses on the future and culture of law. Drawing from a variety of disciplines and perspectives --including science, technology, neuro-culture, positive psychology, and entrepreneurship-- it sweeps through current hot topics such as globalization, commoditization, democratization, big data, artificial intelligence, online algorithms, disruptive technology, the new economy, hacking, mindfulness, and more. Extensively researched, visionary, futuristic, and written in a crisp, conversational style by a man on a mission to bring professional excellence and personal wellbeing to the people who learn, teach, and practice the law.

The Future of Law collection boldly predicts the future of law practice, lawyers, and the law itself, which Kevin summarizes as follows:

The new practice models and technologies we’re already seeing won’t merely change how law is practiced, but will re-create lawyers themselves -- who they are, and what they do.

As a result, a new kind of lawyer will in a new kind of law practice, alongside a new kind of legal expert who wouldn’t even qualify to be called a lawyer in today’s regulatory environment.

Alongside both of them, consumers (no longer “clients”) will themselves also practice law in a wave of legal DIY aided by artificial intelligence algorithms engineered by cyber geeks and served up online.

The combined impetus of these developments will create a new kind of law-- new in both substantive content and in how it is created, shaped, communicated, and applied.

In particular, this new kind of law will be created and disseminated, and will grow and change, by processes other than the historical reliance on legislation and appellate precedent and lawyer-to-client communication.

Finally, the advent of this new kind of law will transform the law’s role as a foundational institution in the larger cultural context in which it lives and moves and has its being.

The Culture of Law section explores the author’s belief that, in order for the new legal entrepreneurial practice models and technologies to sustain themselves, a new culture for the legal profession will need to arise with them. Kevin follows his interest in neuroscience to examine how culture is formed from the inside out -- beginning literally with how lawyers’ brains are re-wired in law school and upon entry into legal practice. This examination leads to this far-reaching conclusion:

“The practice models and cultural dynamics that make up the legal profession’s status quo today simply will not be with us in 50 years. Some won’t be here in 20, maybe not in 5 or 10. Some are gone already. As they disappear -- one by one, and in batches -- a new world of law will emerge to replace them. And when it does, the law’s role in human society -- and thus human society itself -- will have changed with it.”

The Legal Times ends by challenging “those of us who inhabit the legal profession, who consider it an essential milieu of our work and our lives” to lend a hand in creating the law’s new future and culture. “The question is not whether the new future and culture of law will arrive, it is whether we’ll lend a hand in bringing it about.”

Drawing on insights gathered from science, technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, neuroscience, psychology, and from his personal experiences as a practicing lawyer, The Legal Times is extensively researched, visionary, and written in a crisp, conversational style by a man on a mission to bring wellbeing to the people who learn, teach, and practice the law.

Although focused on the legal profession, this book’s lessons are widely applicable to a multitude of other arenas experiencing radical transformation in our world today.

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