What the work decides
A lawyer uses judgment to read the context in front of them, the knowledge of the company and the law, and to decide what matters and what does not. Knowledge and memory feed that judgment, and more of it is starting to be handled by technology. How much more comes down to the trust we can build in the process: how we review it, and how we know when it goes wrong.
Judgment, broken into seven steps
Sometimes you look at a deal and something seems off. That is intuition, and it is judgment, and until now nobody has had to explain it to technology. The seven steps below are what happens when a person stops to make a call, in the order it happens.
Technology acquires judgment from how the lawyer changes its work
Every change a lawyer makes to a draft the technology produced is a call it could not make on its own. Count those changes at each step and you have a map of where the judgment still sits with the person. Where the count stays high, keep a person there, or write the rule and teach it. Where it falls over a few months, either that step has gone routine or the lawyer has stopped looking.
If we want more of our judgment in the technology, we have to think about how we state it, because most of it has never been said out loud. Sometimes the technology asks us directly. Sometimes it puts two versions in front of us and we pick. Sometimes it watches what we change. From the side of one senior lawyer on the team, those three look like this.
It asks what she checks for, then scores against it
The technology puts the question to her: what she looks for, what she will and will not accept. Her answers get written down, and every draft gets checked against the list.
A record anyone can read and contest.
Ask her what she checks for and she names a handful, because the rest are reading reflexes she has never had to put into words.
Which of these would you send
She sees two drafts and picks one, and across enough pairs her preference comes through.
Her real ordering, faster than any list captures it.
The technology picks up what she prefers and never picks up why, because the choice carries no reasons with it.
Keep what she changed
The corrections are already happening on every draft, and in most departments they get made and kept nowhere the technology can read them back.
A signal the department has already paid for.
A correction carries no reason. Ask for one at the moment or it never exists, and the one she types may be written for the box.
What happened has to be observable, traceable, and auditable
If technology took part in a call, the lawyer who signed should be able to see what it did, follow how it got there, and have someone else check it afterwards. That takes six things, in words a lawyer would use.