As office boy I made such a mark
That they gave me the post of a junior clerk
I served the writs with a smile so bland
And I copied all the letters in a big round hand
I copied all the letters in a hand so free
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navy
In serving writs I made such a name
That an articled clerk I soon became
I wore clean collars and a brand-new suit
For the Pass Examination at the Institute
And that Pass Examination did so well for me
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navy
Most large commercial lawsuits settle before they ever go to court. From my anecdotal experience, maybe only 10% go to court. Litigation is a very long and expensive process. Some files last decades before they resolve. When litigation is ongoing, both sides are engaging in legal wrestling to try and get the most favorable position. Once one side has gained a clear advantage, they will start pressuring the other side to settle. Its very expensive to go all the way to court and then lose, so most corporations will concede and settle once they lose the upper-hand. Therefore if a case does finally make it to court, its because (1) both sides have a decent chance of winning, or (2) one side - or both - hate each other so much that they refuse to settle. The first option, (1), is the most common: the case is so close that its essentially a coin flip. Remember, you only hear about the cases that go to court, and most settlements are confidential and never hit the news. So the public's perception of commercial law doesn't include the full picture.
I'm almost positive that litigation will never be fully automated. Some aspects of it already have (such as document review and discovery). But the majority of the work (negotiating with the other side, questioning witnesses, arguing pre-trial motions in court, researching legal questions, writing memos and briefs, advising clients on strategy) is far too reliant on humans to ever be replaced.
> (1) both sides have a decent chance of winning, or (2) one side - or both - hate each other so much that they refuse to settle.
There are three other categories of cases you missed and (1) can and should be divided up further into two categories. The third situation arises when one party to the suit simply cannot afford to lose under any circumstances but somehow can still afford to keep paying lawyers indefinitely. Frequently you will see this with large companies fighting to prevent or delay a class action or against an adverse regulatory decision which poses an existential threat to their industry. $50m in legal bills per year doesn't even register against a multi-billion dollar class action risk.
The fourth situation is when one of the parties has a non-financial incentive to continue the litigation, often from a political perspective. For example, when Hobby Lobby in the US sued to get out of the Obamacare birth control coverage requirement. They would have spent themselves into the ground on that case because the principle mattered more to the litigants than the cost.
The fifth situation is when one or both parties have bad lawyers. We (lawyers) don't like to admit how often this happens, but frequently one of the lawyers just completely misinterprets the law or fails to recognize essential facts. They may oversell the case to the client and then paint themselves into a corner which they can't gracefully back out of, and so drag the case out well past its proper expiration date just to avoid admitting they screwed up.
Regarding your (1) point, the evidence for both sides is roughly evenly matched in some cases, so the judge or jury's interpretation of the facts will dictate the outcome. How people weigh and interpret evidence can be incredibly unpredictable, which may prevent settlement in those cases. In other cases, the law is unclear or unsettled, whether because previous cases were poorly decided, a law was poorly drafted, or the issue is truly novel. So unclear law or unclear facts. In an ideal world, those would be the only reasons that anyone would ever go to court.
All of these situations are extremely rare. In terms of quantity of cases, unfortunately people that hate each account for the overwhelming majority, though that tends to be most common where the parties have a B2C or or close business associate relationship, or in non-commercial litigation (most visibly and notably in family law cases). B2B/arms-length commercial relationship litigation tends by and large to be a more coldly rational affair, though not without exception.
Actually I think the biggest argument against the "profession x will be replaced by machines" reflex is the absence data to train an algorithm. All of the key information is unstructured in emails, decks, meetings and conference calls. How do you train even infinitely better algorithms?
And also what is it going to cost to staff AI professionals to create and support an algorithm vs the salary savings of the 100 guys who must do that job in the UK...
Good, but the more dollars you pump into it the better the odds get for you. I would say (and at a large dollar scale, hundreds of thousands or millions) the RNG state is slowly leaked. If the other side puts in as much money as you, they see the same state ;)
One anecdote from around the same time, possibly apocryphal,
is widely shared. At a chambers that had expanded and was bringing
in more money, three silks decided their chief clerk’s compensation,
at 10 percent, had gotten out of hand. They summoned him for
a meeting and told him so. In a tactical response that highlights
all the class baggage of the clerk-barrister relationship,
as well as the acute British phobia of discussing money,
the clerk surprised the barristers by agreeing with them.
“I’m not going to take a penny more from you,” he concluded.
The barristers, gobsmacked and paralyzed by manners, never
raised the pay issue again, and the clerk remained on at
10 percent until retirement.
My command of the English language fails me here. Could somebody explain his response to me?
I's not clear, but my interpretation is that they'd called him & began the meeting with "We'd like to discuss your salary; we see your compensation is at 10%"; without making it clear that they were planning to lower it. The clerk pre-empted their plan to lower it; but tactically said "I'd not take a penny more from you" to imply that he'd assumed they were about to offer him more. By this action, he's shown that he's not going to be greedy & take more even if offered, which puts the silks in an awkward situation where to correct him & say that they meant to lower it would be rude given he'd "so generously" declined the fictional offer of a pay rise.
Thank you, that interpretation was the one that made the most sense to me, too. But I figured I might be missing some context from British culture or class dynamics.
A penny being the smallest unit of currency. So he's simply stating that he'll not take any more money in recognition of the fact that he was very well compensated.
This implicitly discounts the possibility to reduce the amount of money he'd take - and so if that's something the barristers wanted to do they'd have to explicitly bring it up. Which, I think we can all agree, would be simply too awful to contemplate.
I saw this as a veiled threat from the Clerk that they'd drop the barristers as clients - in other words the clerk wouldn't ask for a penny more compensation because he wouldn't be passing the barristers any more work.
Indeed. And in this veiled threat contained a promise that as long as the fee [10%] was paid, the Clerk would continue to work without problem or hassle.
In making so, the cost/risk of the Clerk was minimised compared, in modern language, to changing vendor. There were no more hidden costs.
The point is the 'perceived' dignity by barristers not touching money but only dealing with their clients on the cases. There is indeed a point that barristers are often 'academically brilliant and emotionally fragile' and incredibly eloquent I should add. It is not an optimisation issue or machine learning issue. It is almost the core of humanity - emotions that we will and do not want AI to replace. Well, at least for my part.
>There are solicitors, who provide legal advice from their offices, and there are barristers, who argue in court. Barristers get the majority of their business via solicitors, and clerks act as the crucial middlemen between the tribes—they work for and sell the services of their barristers, steering inquiring solicitors to the right man or woman.
>Clerks are by their own cheerful admission “wheeler-dealers,” what Americans might call hustlers. They take a certain pride in managing the careers of their bosses, the barristers—a breed that often combines academic brilliance with emotional fragility. Many barristers regard clerks as their pimps.
Managing relationships between lawyers? I think it seems a bit more tricky than playing Go.
Also, most of this relationship management happens in pubs (really), so until we have a robot that can drink and smoke and stagger, this one stays with the humans.
They're a very close-knit and rambunctiously boozy clique.
My first thought was how plausible it'd be to write an algorithm to do the client-barrister matching for you, but I get the vibe from this article that the relationship between barristers and clerks is more about some sort of unique social tradition than it is about the actual work of client matching and fare collecting. But then again, I'm not British and cannot say for sure.
