How the ‘Hadfield Challenges’ inspired legal tech solutions across the globe
USC Law Professor Gillian Hadfield on hackathons and new models for the legal sector
Law and Economics Professor Gillian Hadfield was driving down the LA freeway, listening to a national news report, when a startling statistic about her state came through the airwaves: less than 5000 out of the million eligible Californians have applied to clear their marijuana-related convictions under California’s new law. In a stroke of serendipity, the “Hadfield Challenges” were born, inspiring hackathon participants all over the globe to create innovative solutions to “problems worth solving” in the legal sector, including easier ways for people to expunge their marijuana records.
The GLH was only weeks away when Hadfield began tweeting out a series of challenges for prospective Global Legal Hack-ers to solve, ranging from creating reliable identification systems to new ways of measuring law students’ competency.
Hadfield teaches first-year contracting and a legal design lab at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law. She explained that she landed on these specific problem areas for two reasons.
First, says Hadfield, “It’s a bit of a critique of some of the innovation hype where all the focus is on innovation and not as much on what problems we should be trying to solve.”
And second, the challenges are meant to address her concern that legal innovation is often focused on “solving problems for lawyers in high end legal markets,” while “ordinary people, small businesses, and poor countries” face major legal challenges every day. “There’s a tremendous need for innovative energy to be directed toward these problems worth solving,” says Hadfield.
Hadfield observes that many of the teams embraced these challenges — both directly and indirectly — particularly with their solutions aimed at “lowering the costs of interacting with the legal system,” as well as those that help people understand legislation and promote consensus-finding.
She was also happy to see teams working on simple contracting tools. “It doesn’t sound very sexy,” says Hadfield of simple contracting, “but it’s really fundamental, especially throughout large parts of the world that just don’t have good, basic legal infrastructure.”
The need to change the legal infrastructure on a global scale is the central premise of Hadfield’s latest book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy. In it, she argues that the private sector must take on a larger role in order to generate innovative solutions and build a better legal infrastructure.
“There’s a tremendous need for innovative energy to be directed toward these problems worth solving.” —USC Law Professor Gillian Hadfield
“Currently we think of law as a government product,” says Hadfield. But she believes that the private sector could help develop better systems to accomplish public objectives by incorporating the right kinds of data, processes, supervision, and rules — with appropriate government oversight, of course. More input from the private sector would also “allow us to attract the energy, the money, and the ideas” necessary to build better solutions to legal problems.
She cites the need to create a data protection regulatory framework, a corollary of the recent controversy involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytics. One way to create a solution to the issue would be through traditional government entities like Parliament or Congress or civil servants. Another would be to encourage a marketplace for private regulators, says Hadfield.
Instead of starting another social network, for example, Hadfield would like to see people who may have left these companies work on a building a regulatory system that provides the level of control and data security set out by governments, and be responsible for licensing companies in their relevant industries.
Hadfield refers to this model as creating markets for “competitive approved private regulators.” She cites the way that legal services providers are regulated in the UK under the Legal Services Act. The government’s Legal Services Board takes applications from private regulators to become an approved regulator which can then license legal service providers.
While Hadfield believes that there still could be more innovation on this front, she is hopeful that the next few years will prove more innovative — and more competitive — for this model.
A new legal infrastructure may not be possible, though, if lawyers are trained only about the rules rather than the rule-making process.
Hadfield would like to see more thinking — and teaching — “on a fundamental level about what we’re trying to accomplish with law.” Given that not everyone in law school decides they want to be lawyers, she believes that the “raw material” is there for students to say, “I don’t just learn how to crank through our existing legal rules; I’m going to be the person who reinvents how people do contracts or how we regulate workplaces.”
The same goes for the tech sector. “Everyone is always focused on the question of does the technology work, but we won’t actually have autonomous vehicles on the road unless we figure out how to build the regulatory structure that works for everybody,” says Hadfield, citing Uber’s recent self-driving car fatality.
“That’s the big regulatory challenge. And I think we need a lot more smart people and money thinking about it.”
This is precisely why events like the Global Legal Hackathon are important from Hadfield’s perspective — to “get people connected to law outside of this straight-jacket of thinking that law is about how to read a 60-page document or how to digest a million pages of case law.”
According to Hadfield, “Because the Global Legal Hackathon reaches beyond just lawyers to include designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs, there’s lots of opportunity to invent really, really important stuff here that we haven’t paid enough attention to.” Like models for making freeways safer with the rise of autonomous vehicles, an idea that comes full circle for Hadfield.
Ultimately, she hopes the hackathon will spawn more thinking about how to approach “alternative models” to operating and regulating industries, instead of taking these systems for granted. “Maybe that’s the next big challenge for the Global legal hackathon.”
