Of Supersonic Flight, Space Travel - and the Big Boom Sounding around the Global Legal Industry

"There's more to life than being a passenger." [Amelia Earhart]

I used to stand in the back yard with my father as he excitedly pointed out Concorde in the sky above our heads. Try as I might, I never did hear the infamous "big boom" but the fact it was flying overhead was exciting enough. Concorde was the flagship of modern ingenuity, state-of-the-art engineering and evidence, as it happens, of an extraordinary level of cooperation between the Brits and the French in building it. Two unlikely champions of inegnuity coming together to create something exponentially greater than anything before and arguably, since.

It was many years before I took a left turn, not the right, to see the history of space flight at Cape Canaveral. The legal conference I was attending couldn't match the draw of walking on the same walkway Armstrong walked across on his way to the moon - or seeing the mighty space shuttle suspended from the ceiling of the vast Canaveral atrium. Awe is a real thing - and I experienced it then. Years of delighting in the expeditions and scientific discovery inherent in the extraordinary shuttle missions program.

And then, silence. We didn't go to space much. A void and sadness that we were no longer breaking the earth's pull and instead settling for less.

And then, Elon Musk. With his vocal fans and detractors in equal measure, he boldly declared space open once more - with the meticulously choreographed SpaceX launches akin to intricate ballet performances in the sky.

And talk of going to Mars.

But we won't be going to Mars in Concorde - or in any one of a million prior generations of aircraft no matter how valuable they were in their time.

Our astronauts won't be wearing bulky, movement-constraining spacesuits like you see on the grainy monochrome space footage and in the display cabinets at Canaveral.

But we will go.

And I think that is what makes me think about where we are as a legal industry. We've had bursts of technical ingenuity and waves of economic benefit resulting from technology breakthroughs and the modern thinking they encompassed - and we've also had valleys of listlessness between the peaks.

We may not have Elon Musk in the legal industry yet (I wish we did) - but we do have some veritable superstars and bold entrepreneurs who have risked a lot over the years including their homes, reputations and futures to get stuff built and into common circulation. And we now have tech like #AI and #quantumcomputing coming through.

A lot of folks are looking at the (legal industry) sky and asking where this is going. Where is technology taking us? Or is it just leaving us all behind? How does this work? What does it look like? Will what we do now, what we wear now, how we do things now - even survive in a new orbit? Are we equipped and ready for flight to who knows where?

Because law is, assuredly, moving into a new orbit. Where we are going doesn't look like where we've been. That's the edge you can feel in the air - the growing sense that what got us here won't get us there. And the "us" in that sentence is a big variable.

The opportunity is as yet still unknown and perhaps not even credibly quantifiable. The demands on us, the space travellers in this story, are significant - just how much so is also still unknown.

When my dad and I stood watching Concorde, mankind had already walked on the moon. Now it almost seems quicker to list the countries who don't have space-related programs and, aside Mars, there is work in hand to return to the moon's surface - but this time, to build a future base and potential colony for mankind.

Back then, we had all seen Star Trek - I think that program, no matter how fanciful, was influential in popularizing, encouraging and centivizing space exploration. It showed what we wanted to believe and what we wanted to do - years before so much of it became entirely possible. It's too easy to simply say the genie is out of the bottle for law (it is). Perhaps the more pertinent question is why not. Why would we not explore, press the boundaries of discovery, and expand our appreciation of the known universe?

What would that mean? Well akin to what Musk has spoken of for X (formerly known as Twitter), it may mean law becomes a hybrid digitally transactional economic sector - moreso than traditional legal services - where outcome is king. That means digital products, not people. So that might involve radically fewer people than we have today in process-related functions since we have tech that is starting to do all the heavy-lifting and clients really only want to pay for what they want .. answers and outcomes.

Does it mean less work for lawyers or (you read it here first) "legal product producers" (LPs) - not at all - but it does mean a shift in importance and emphasis on the provider side of the equation. Just like we wouldn't try taking a Jumbo 747 or Concorde to the moon, we won't be taking thousands of people with us that we don't need. Not if the tech does it better, faster and cheaper (and it does).

I hate to talk of hard landings in the context of air or spatial flight - but in the legal industry, there are going to be some major ditchings. Look out for the sight of parachutes on the near horizon.

Do we ever get back to the "bums on seats" and "fill seats by all means possible" billing mentality that has been indemic within parts of the legal industry for many years. I would be bold enough to say a robust "maybe not, with the emphasis on not". We're still very early into our appreciation for what AI can do and has the potential to do - and that is aside the potential of quantum computing and the like also - but the directional evidence is clear. Very, very clear indeed.

If lawyers don't offer a way, clients will find their own way - to use technology that cuts out the time and cost of getting "legal stuff" done. Because that's all it is to a lot of folks - it's legal stuff, right alongside sales stuff, marketing stuff, staffing stuff, real estate stuff and shareholder dividends stuff etc. At the end of the day, legal stuff is still just stuff.

Man's first step on the moon, Concorde's first supersonic flight above our heads and SpaceX's ballet in space were almost inevitable steps in human evolution and industrial revolution. We know we have not yet conquered the "final frontier" but we know our present horizons are dating fast.

That same fragrance of inevitability wafts in the air around law - and the sense that what we do today, what we hold tight to today, what is closely sentimental to us, simply won't be enough - is palpable. That unmistakably loud noise is a sonic boom sounding in the legal industry as tech muscles in for a major fight for dominance of the landscape.

How should you react? I can't tell you what to do - that is a uniquely personal life decision - but I can offer the same perspective offered by one of my favorite adventurers in avionic history, Amelia Earhart:

"There's more to life than being a passenger."

And that, in a nutshell, is the advice I would offer anyone in or entering the legal industry today.

David Kinnear (DK) '23

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