To be « legal, » of course, is to « refer to the law. »19 While there are jurisprudential disagreements about what exactly « law » is, these philosophical disputes can be largely ignored for our current purposes. Assuming we adopt a sufficiently broad definition, little will revolve around their exact philosophical perspective. Shapiro`s definition of lawful activities as such, which are « common, official, institutional, mandatory [and] self-certifying » acts of social planning with a moral purpose,20 provides a sufficient definition of law and legality. These actions lead to social plans that can manifest themselves in the form of rules, regulations, norms, common law principles, etc., which constitute what we commonly refer to as « the law. » Thus, being a « legal » technology means being a technology that relates to one of these social plans or the resulting system of rules, common, official, institutional and binding norms.21 Because of the normative concerns that can arise when technologies have substantial legal implications, they must be treated with great care. Some would argue that these technologies should be strictly limited to a few areas of law so as not to compromise the humanity inherent in the law.66 At the very least, these technologies are less likely to raise serious concerns when it comes to areas of law that do not raise serious moral questions.67 If the law in question is to « coordinate the rules »68 with a clear utility function, such as: the function of traffic laws, safe and appropriate traffic management – There is little concern about the impact that a technology might have on content. All that matters to us is that the rule in question actually serves its purpose. On the other hand, if the laws in question raise important moral considerations – for example, criminal laws – we should think about the substantial changes that legal technologies could make possible. In these cases, technology should not be used to deprive individuals of their « human right to choice »69, and if it is used, it should first be adopted in hybrid form alongside human decision-makers.70 The concept of technological affordances28 provides a way to discuss the capabilities of legal technologies while understanding the complex and socially constructed nature of their reality or perception. • Recognize the use and potential of the project. Building on Gibson`s introduction of affordance into the cognitive psychology literature,29 science and technology scientists30 and design scientists31 have adopted it to discuss in more detail how technologies can and are used. Hutchby defines technological affordances as « the possibilities that [technologies] offer to act ».32 Affordances describe all the functional capabilities of a technology. Take a paperback, for example. It has a variety of options, including conveying a narrative story, weighing papers in a windy office, beating houseflies, etc.

Although these affordances are characteristics of the book, their availability depends on the context. If the book is perceived by someone who cannot read or write in their language, its narrative affordance is not available, but it retains its clipboard capacity (Figure 2). Despite their direct legal implications, these technologies don`t need to be too complex, and some of them have been widely used for many decades. For example, tax preparation software that takes into account particular circumstances – for example, income, marital status, etc. – as input and makes a decision about its own tax obligations falls into this category of deep legal technology. These programs are designed to take into account the relevant tax legislation and to make legal findings by comparing a situation with that legislation. When these technologies are official in nature and therefore able to make legally binding decisions on tax obligations, they become even more directly legal as they further reduce the need for human mediation between the facts and the legal outcome. Other examples of deep legal technology include recent inventions such as « smart contracts, » which are designed to monitor terms and execute as required by the agreement,36 or automated trademark counterfeiting detectors that use artificial intelligence to monitor IP portfolios and make judgments about potential infringements.37 Legal technologies are diverse. They have the potential to improve access to justice and exacerbate inequalities. Without a sufficiently rich conceptualization and accompanying vocabulary, we run the risk of eliminating this diversity and hindering our ability to harness the promise and challenge of legal technology.

This article proposed a definition of legal technology as « any device that can be used as a means of interacting with the substance of the law or assisting its user to interact with the law and the skills and techniques with which we use it. » These technologies were then classified according to their direct interaction with the law and their specifically legal or general character. Four types of technologies are identified: enabling technologies; generic legal technology; Flat Legal Tech and Deep Legal Tech. These provide a framework for reflection and discussion on legal technologies that goes beyond the usual categorizations of « the field of law » that accompany them. Legal implications are the consequences or consequences of being involved in something under the law. At the top of the hierarchy of legal technologies are technologies that primarily enable legal applications and deal directly and deeply with the law. These technologies do this by making legal decisions, enforcing the law directly or indirectly, or perhaps updating the law itself. Some may consider this « real » legal technology because they are so closely tied to the law. Much of the recent enthusiasm for legal technology revolves around the promise of profound legal technology to change the institution of law or the way we interact with it.35 In addition to the legal implications that technology can have in enabling changes to the law itself, and the functional implications it may have, While they change the way legal practice is and the functioning of legal systems, legal technologies can also have broader social implications, as they transform communities governed by the legal systems that adopt them.

These non-legal implications are similar to those that can arise from any technology, and so I call them « general implications » here. This type of involvement often results from the substantial and functional changes brought about by legal technology. Since the legal system is closely linked to society, changing the substance of the law or changing its practice in functionally important ways will almost certainly have consequences that are not legal in nature. To avoid such cases, your legal and human resources department should keep copies of candidates` resumes. Copies can be used to prove that you hired based on your qualifications. Lower and middle managers contribute to discriminatory behaviour in the organization. To deal with such behavior, hold regular meetings with your employees to monitor employee relations. THEREFORE, we offer the following policy statement on intellectual property and the legal and ethical use of software. All this means that legal technologies also have affordances, and these types of affordances differ in that they are exclusively legal. The specificity dimension reflects this and represents the degree to which a technology has a set of specifically legal or more general affordances. Sometimes the availability of these offers depends on the context, for example whether the user is a layman, a lawyer or a person working in an official capacity, but regardless of whether the offers are present or not.

Low-specificity legal technologies – i.e. enabling technologies – may have legal options, but so may many non-legal options. They can be applied to law or legal practice, but they can also be used for independent purposes. For example, the word processing software I currently use is a generic technology. It can be used to deal with the law, but it is not primarily intended for such use and it has many non-legal uses. At the other end of the spectrum, there would be technology with very specific legal possibilities and few that are not legally linked. For example, an automated contract clause generator has almost exclusively legally relevant offers. What distinguishes these superficial legal technologies from their deeper legal counterparts is their relatively limited direct engagement with the law. For example, although the precedent search engine may be designed very specifically for legal purposes and is indeed an important part of many legal practices, it does not deal with the law as such. It does not make legal decisions and leaves most of the legal work to the human practitioner. Recently, more and more technologies have moved beyond this dynamic by engaging more directly with the law itself and further automating legal work. After spending all that time and effort defining and mapping legal technology, it would be very understandable to ask, « Why? » Why is it important that the most amorphous technologies sometimes referred to as « legal technology » can be classified according to these two dimensions of their generic usefulness and the directness with which they deal with the law? Does the categorization that makes this sorting possible offer more than a useful « meaningful » explanation for legal technologies? The amendment to the Copyright Act 1990 makes it illegal to « loan, rent or rent software » for direct or indirect commercial gain without the express permission of the copyright owner.