Advanced Computing Could Expand, Democratize Law

Think of advanced computing entering the legal sphere as analogous to the printing press entering the publishing world. It could become the catalyst for enormous expansion, with the potential to “change the industry into something bigger, better, and more democratic than it is now,” writes Sam Glover for Lawyerist. Glover looks at an article written by Stephen Wolfram, Computational Law, Symbolic Discourse and the AI Constitution, which envisions computing making contracts vastly more complex. “[O]nce we reduce contract to code – symbolic discourse language – we will be able to think about legal relationships at a much higher level while the basic stuff takes care of itself,” Glover writes. “And there will be lawyers or some version of legal knowledge professional helping out at every stage of the process, enabling much more complex legal relationships than we are capable of describing effectively today.”