The Future of Legal Tech, Civil Procedure, and the Adversarial System

Moderator: David Engstrom

Most agree that legal tech is transforming litigation and the legal profession. But there is less consensus about the impact advances in legal tech will have on broader features of our civil justice system or the rules of procedure that structure it. This panel will bring together legal academics and senior practitioners to take a longer view of the legal tech revolution. Among the questions to be addressed are:

• How, if at all, will legal tech force adaptation of civil procedure rules, such as the work-product rule, proportionality in discovery, Rule 11, doctrines concerned with forum-shopping, or class action rules?
• What implications does legal tech hold for key trends within our civil justice system — e.g., the vanishing trial or the allocation of power to judges over juries?
• How will legal tech shift our conceptions of the institutional role of litigation or of the conditions necessary for a healthy adversarial system? For instance, how to assess claims that predictive analytics will blunt incentives for litigants to conduct socially valuable but privately costly discovery, decrease rather than increase system transparency, or stunt the dynamic evolution of legal norms?