Flipping the Law with the Internet of Things
Last week, I had an interesting conversation with one of LegalZoom’s executives while trapped in San Francisco’s famous traffic. We talked about a lot of topics while not moving. We’re both “big picture” guys when it comes to the legal setting, seeing trends emerging as legal continues to change.
At one point, he asked, “If you could rebuild the legal system, how would you design it?”
I gave it a couple of minutes (and no forward momentum) worth of thought and replied, “I’d flip the system, but that’s already going to happen soon anyway.”
When pressed, I posited that technology and interconnectedness are going to eliminate a lot of the legal issues we currently turn to courts to solve. Instead of fixing problems, legal issues will be anticipated and prevented by technology. A coming co-mingling of consumer technology and internet connectedness, called the “Internet of Things” (IoT), will just remove many harms and actions that lead to legal disputes. The IoT moniker refers to consumer technology, like refrigerators and cars, that are already becoming connected to the internet. They will have new memory and reporting capabilities that can be used in new ways. It’s not that these actions may never occur again after IoT, it’s just that a system will eventually arise that makes a lot of legal problems difficult to create.
Here’s a partial list of some practice areas that need to worry about this.
- Personal injury
- Product liability
- Class actions
- Traffic misdemeanors
- Real estate ownership disputes
Why do these areas need to worry, because technology is coming for their jobs.
Take the latest listeria outbreak as an example. As of April 21, 2015, a total of ten people with listeriosis related to this outbreak have been confirmed from 4 states: Arizona, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, with three deaths reported from Kansas. Illness onset dates ranged from January 2010 through January 2015, a full five years! The manufacturer pulled all of its products currently on the market made at all of its facilities, including ice cream, frozen yogurt, sherbet, and frozen snacks, because they have the potential to be contaminated. Law firms are already advertising, looking for potential class members with which to initiate a class action lawsuit.
When smart fridges become common, listeria outbreaks may still happen. But when they do, your fridge will warn you if the affected ice cream is among your purchases and tell you to toss the tainted goods. Health officials may be able to track how much corrupted dairy good is still in home storage, preparing local health officials against outbreaks. And, the ice cream producer could refund the purchase price via coupons delivered via your fridge. Could a class action arise in this interconnected future? Sure, but the plaintiffs firm will find it harder to demonstrate widespread damages.
The largest recall of automobiles in the history of the U.S. would be different too, if cars were already a part of the IoT. Recently, 33.8 million vehicles have been declared defective because they are equipped with airbags that can explode and spray occupants with shards of metal. That’s a serious defect. Experts are saying it will take years to remove or fix all the affected cars. Understandably, a class action lawsuit has been launched over this product defect.
If I had an IoT car, it could monitor recalls for me, and tell me whether or not it is affected. I could even authorize a driverless IoT car to schedule an appointment for recall repairs during hours when I’m not going to need my car. The driverless car could head to the closest dealer, get fixed, and return with no hassle on my part. Does that sound like science fiction? Google is already sending a fleet of driverless cars onto public roads as its testing continues, and many devices we own notify us of updates when their software is out-of-date or insecure. It’s not a stretch to consider the same approach physical products, reducing and removing consumer and product liability actions from the legal system.
(The downside to the IoT car, in this instance, is that it may not let you ride in it if a recall is considered dangerous to life and limb. In order to avoid loss of life, regulators may use the IoT monitoring to disable dangerous vehicles. Of course, a firm may form a class action suing for the opportunity to risk injury in a defective car, but I wouldn’t take that case.)
But driverless cars are not just good for preventing injury due to product recalls. How many speeding tickets and driving under the influence citations (DUIs) will happen when we no longer drive the cars in which we ride? Driverless cars are expected to end bad driving, with one study predicting that by 2030, connected and autonomous vehicles could save over 2,500 lives and prevent more than 25,000 serious accidents in the UK. If I were a lawyer handling DUI and vehicle injury claims, I’d worry about where my practice is going in the far future.
Even in the near future, without driverless cars, easily summoned car services could already be reducing drunk driving. In one study, Uber claims that the entrance of Uber in Seattle caused the number of arrests for DUI to decrease by more than 10%. We need an additional study to see if courts and lawyers are feeling the impact of this decreased number of arrests. Overworked and underfunded courts are probably meeting this news with relief; DUI-defense lawyers are probably not feeling as much relief.
Connectedness is reducing the opportunities and excuses for injury and reckless behavior, in turn reducing the need for legal action relating to that behavior. As this connectedness becomes more commonplace, situations that used to end in legal action may never occur. Or when they do occur, the harm is contained and minimized, reducing the scope of legal action. This is the flipping of the legal system that I anticipate. Legal protections are going to become part of our normal functioning, instead of turning to legal actions last resort for when things go wrong.
To prepare, legal professionals should be looking at what parts of their practices will disappear as the public relies more on the convenience of the IoT. Legal professionals should also consider how they can contribute to building a IoT system that considers not just convenience, but justice and rights while functioning. For example, lawyer Tim Hwang is leading a workgroup on issues of data transparency of transportation network companies, like Uber, drafting model legislation that covers a host of issues, from privacy to cooperating with law enforcement.
Just because the legal system may be flipping from reaction to prevention with technology does not mean that we won’t need lawyers. Lawyers will just need to be a part of the planning process, instead of the clean up crew.
