Tears in the Rain

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannh?user Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

In many science-fiction works – such as Blade Runner and its source novel, Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – the question of humanity comes down to empathy. In Blade Runner and its sequel, Blade Runner 2049, the police apply the fictional Voight Kampff test to measure empathy and determine whether someone is a human or an android ‘replicant’. It is ironic, then, that empathy is often a quality deemed lacking from the traditional definition of the lawyer’s role. Especially in a world defined by technology, “Who or what counts as human?” could be reworded as “Who or what counts as lawyer?”

Too often in the legal profession, there remains a stubborn focus on elevating the qualifications, experience and viewpoints of lawyers over those of non- lawyers. This has ramifications for both creativity and innovation in the legal sector. I used the ‘tears in the rain’ quote from Blade Runner because it sprang to mind during a discussion with a group of lawyer and non-lawyer colleagues as part of the Bionic Lawyer on the future of the profession. The irony was that from looking at us and listening to us, you would have been unable to tell which of us were qualified or practising lawyers and which were not.  The discussion also took place not long after the death of Rutger Hauer whose character Roy Batty delivered the 42-word monologue at the end of Blade Runner.

Not a negative: what does it mean to be a non-lawyer?

Let’s start by deconstructing the term ‘non-lawyer’. First, the term implicitly elevates the primacy of the lawyer; the prefix ‘non-’ suggests that everything else is somehow lacking or sub-par. If you’re not convinced substitute the word ‘man’ or ‘white’ for lawyer…

The lawyer/non-lawyer dichotomy is primarily a semantic distinction used in law firms, whose business model is defined and owned by lawyers. But in reality, especially in Big Law, the success of a firm can depend on many non-lawyers. And this is increasingly the case – not least due to the heightened focus in business on innovation and digitisation. From the client perspective, moreover, lawyers are often not the best people to run, plan or impose process on legal projects. Many lawyers are not used to thinking in a process- driven way.

The innovation revolution which is redefining the industry itself involves a redefinition of what it is to be a lawyer. As technology accelerates and machine learning becomes more sophisticated, the human qualities that lawyers bring – and that technology cannot replicate – will be crucial.

 Do we even need lawyers?

In some of the earliest attempts to make the practice of law more creative – such as the DuPont Legal Model and Jeff Carr’s focus on the value equation at FMC Technologies– a key focus was to establish what lawyers were actually necessary for. This is not about making lawyers redundant, but rather about asking where they can add most value: essentially, what is the real purpose of being a lawyer?

It is interesting that – particularly for in-house lawyers – the more senior they become, the more human centred leadership skills trump legal skills such as technical drafting and knowledge of case law. Understanding, communication and judgement are all vital tools in the general counsel’s toolbox.

But in the formative years of a lawyer’s training does the overspecialisation that characterises the legal profession preclude a recognition of what other disciplines can bring to the table, in terms of complementary skill sets and ideas? Do we need to look more closely at what a lawyer is not to understand what the lawyer of the future could be?

The Link to Blade Runner

As someone who seeks to keep her creative thinking skills fresh, I do like to make random connections; as Steve Jobs once said, making such connections is at the heart of creativity! In much science fiction there’s divergent narratives around what replicating humanity leads to. On the cautionary side of the fence there’s the narrative that if you give the machines too much power, they will ultimately decide that they don’t need us and start to destroy humanity. The original Terminator and rebooted Battle Star Galactica would be good examples of this. On the other side of the fence is the use of the human other to reflect humanity back on itself, usually to cause reflection on whether we are as ‘human’ as we think we are. Blade Runner and the Channel 4 series Humans would be good examples of that as would the 2014 film, Ex Machina. What the human replicants do in these narratives is show the limitations of real humanity; it’s the vanity, ego and basically, inhumanity, of humans which are shown up by their non-human doubles.

Does something that seems to replicate our special qualities focus us more clearly on what we are or what we need to be? One thing that has become increasingly clear is that much of the skill and vision which will propel the future of law will not necessarily be held by lawyers alone or what we traditionally think of as a lawyer- although the strict dictionary definition of a lawyer in anyone engaged in legal services. Much of the earlier narratives around technology and law have been interpreted in the vein of Battle Star Galactica; that technology and non-lawyer solutions to enhance what lawyers do is akin to opening the door to the Cylons!

I’d suggest that what we have is much more of a Blade Runner scenario where the use of non -lawyer talent and tech reveal the imperfections and limitations with the current configuration of what a lawyer is. In the ‘tears in the rain’ speech, Hauer said in an interview in 2009, that these final lines showed that Batty wanted to "make his mark on existence ... the replicant in the final scene, by dying, shows Deckard what a real man is made of.”

As we look to technology and subject matter experts who are not trained as lawyers, it is important that the expertise both offers also causes the profession to reflect on what are the skills and focus that ‘lawyers’ of all sort need to develop.

I write and create content on many things to do with the business of law but increasingly with a focus on the human centred skills that business and law need to succeed in the future.

I also run training and workshops on subjects such as creativity; empathy; influence and collaboration to name a few. Get in touch at [email protected] if you want to chat about any of these topics or just themes in science fiction!