We live in the times of rapid technological developments. This influences business processes, and how companies operate, on a massive scale. Arguably, with AI we face the greatest change since hundreds of years. At the same time, our reality and much of the activities companies perform, are highly regulated. Apart from many existing laws, new laws and regulations are constantly drafted.
One of the goals is to keep up with the technological developments and make sure there are no gaps due to new tools and activities replacing the old and well-known ways of working, conducting societal activities, and also of committing crimes.
At the same time, it is impossible not to observe that the way laws and regulations are being drafted, even when their topic and substance relates to modern technologies or processes, is the same as hundreds of years ago. Laws tend to be lengthy, full of sophisticated, yet inaccurate language, they do not follow formal rules of logic, recitals and preambles are often used to augment the legal text itself etc. It is very difficult to keep up with constant changes of the laws, track and follow many referrals and links included in the text, not to mention turning legal obligations into specific action items and controls which can be implement in an efficient and comprehensible way.
The process to implement such laws and regulations by the companies is also very old and traditional. It lacks efficiency and agility which are characteristic for modern ways of working with technology, and it takes a lot of time and turns out to be extremely expensive and a massive business stopper at the same time. It creates a lot of bottlenecks and is increasingly incomprehensible and strange for modern day employees used to technology and rapid change.
Namely, to implement them, such laws and regulations are being tracked and analyzed by many specialized internal and external legal counsels. They usually cover only a specific section and legal area and have difficulty to see the whole picture. Internal, in-house legal counsels, tend to be almost always supported by external ones. Naturally, this takes time and effort to make sure that many different persons with different levels of expertise in the given subject and stemming from different jurisdictions or legal systems even, as we have civil law and common law countries, find a common ground. This is of course only about lawyers, which slowly, yet diligently and steadily, as legal analysis takes time, try to digest and operationalize such new laws and regulations and put them into the context of old ones and, most importantly, in the context of specific industry and business operations, as there are different industries with different areas and types of regulation. As they draft specific actions items and try to translate such new laws and regulations into something which can be further shared and explained to other relevant departments, such as compliance teams, and, at the end, to business people, new, relevant changes usually happen in the meantime. These are further changes to existing laws and regulations, or completely new ones, but, mostly these are official guidelines and publications related to such new laws and regulations. While such guidelines and other documents by definition are drafted to help operationalize and facilitate implementation of new laws and regulations, they still tend to be full of legal, convoluted language. Analyzing them takes also time and thus, the process to provide legal support to business, desperately needing certainty and sometimes waiting to start or to update certain business operations in light of new requirements, is further stalled and complicated.
Although, there are ideas to support lawyers with AI tools, and, specific tools start to be put into action and have a potential to make lawyers’ work much easier, the problem is in the laws and regulations themselves and in the way they are drafted.
Simply speaking, laws and regulations need to keep up with time and the way they are drafted needs to be fundamentally reinvented and modernized.
We have to acknowledge, that legal requirements need to provide specific action items in a language which is business and technology friendly. Laws should be grouped by domains and tagged to allow for computer search and processing without manual and time-consuming efforts many legal research companies are doing at the moment.
The laws and regulations of the future will increasingly be read, analyzed and implemented by AI or by lawyers augmented with AI, but also by technology and business people themselves, especially for SMEs which cannot afford lawyers.
Laws and regulations need to follow formal rules of logic to avoid being misinterpreted and transformed by AI in ways which would deem them harmful or irrational. AI will not make existing laws more logical, on the contrary, by creating links between them, it will expose and aggravate existing gaps in logical thinking and regulatory coverage.
Laws and regulations, which should be in the future more concise, devoid of manifold links and referrals, unless for only the necessary ones, full of granular, specific action items, and following the formal rules of logic, could then be translated into code and implemented on a software level. Programmers should support legislators in writing legal texts in a logical and coherent way, so they can be processed by machines and be translated into technological and operational controls.
While all this might sound a bit revolutionary, by no means it is really that much different from the transformations we have seen in other disciplines, for example in medicine. The same way as physicians and doctors had to learn completely new ways of working and to work with an information being created and shared in different, innovative ways, the same will happen for legislators and lawyers. Current legal research tools, augmented with such rich content, tagged and able to be processed by machines, could provide specific legal analysis, the same way as physicians are able to get medical analysis directly by interacting with machines and sensors. Current legal research tools, instead, offer only a combination of texts and links, which is better than when one would have to find all this herself, but still, many hours of arduous legal work remain and for many external and internal lawyers as well. Today we expect more, and we believe skills and flexibility lawyers possess and have to offer, could be used to further refine and develop the way organizations work in an ethical and compliant way, rather than trying to digest hundreds of pages of text which hugely remain the types of texts you would find in museums and historical books. New types of laws and regulations, which are business and technology friendly, and both human and machine oriented, are imminent.
