Project Details
Projekt
Towards a digital transformation of the legal professions? Practices and Regulation of Digitalisation in the Legal System
Subject Area
Empirical Social Research
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 523973329
Digitalisation in the legal system is strongly linked to the label Legal Technologies. These range from applications and databases for legal research or data management that can be used in law firms and in courts, to platforms that mediate between demand and supply for legal advice or allow for an easier or even standardised information exchange and asynchronous communication with clients, to technologies that partly automate legal work with the use of algorithms. The proposed project links the debate on legal technologies with the discussion of digital work. It addresses the questions of 1) how digitalisation permeates work, the division of labour and the labour markets of the legal professions, 2) how digitalisation is enabled and perpetuated by political and market regulation, and 3) how both are shaped by intra-professional and political conflicts. Empirically, the project focuses on the emergence of Legal-Tech-Start-Ups in Germany. Due to the technical opportunities of e.g. text recognition programmes, the digital law firms are able to administer thousands of cases simultaneously while the plaintiffs can let them file their lawsuits without even leaving their homes. At least to some extent the work of lawyers or judges is replaced by automatisation and algorithms. Moreover, based on the availability of data on large amounts of cases, and of technologies for their processing and analysis, legal tech start-ups have developed new and Amazon-like business models. The proposed project wants to explore how the Legal-Tech-movement has changed work and the labour market for the legal professions in law firms and courts (mostly ordinary and labour courts). Moreover, it focuses on the politics of digitalisation that has shaped this development. The project pursues an interdisciplinary research program, combining sociology with political science perspectives. Theoretically, the project refers to Fligstein’s ‘architecture of markets’. Recent dynamics in the market for legal services can be described as a competition between and interaction of “incumbents” and “challengers”. Legal tech entrepreneurs are the challengers who call into question the established norms, rules, practices and professional identities of the incumbents which are made up by “traditional” representatives of the legal professions in the judiciary and law firms. Both groups are characterised by pronounced ideas of how the legal system should function and how legal work should be organised “professionally”. The empirical analyses combine different qualitative and quantitative methods. The project focuses on more recent developments and relates them to historically developed professional identities, forms of the division of labour and of regulation. The aim is to understand how the conflicts between challengers and incumbents unfold in everyday routines, in organisations and at the political level, and how this imprints on the historical trajectory of digitalisation in the legal system.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
