Susskind writes
Book news. With great thanks to my publishers, Oxford University Press, I’m really pleased to say that a 30th anniversary edition of my book, THE FUTURE OF LAW, will be released later this year. This was my fourth book. It first appeared in 1996 (the three before were on early AI and law).
My general thesis was straightforward enough – that, in years to come, technology would transform the practice of law and the administration of justice. As AI advances today at a ferocious rate, my thesis of 1996 now looks rather self-evident and prosaic. But do bear in mind some of the systems and technologies that not yet been launched at that time – Google search, Wi-Fi, Wikipedia, Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, iPhone, TikTok, AlphaGo, ChatGPT. Note too that only 1 in 25 people in the UK were online in 1996 and that most lawyers had not yet even seen the Web. I was writing in a different era.
If the past three decades have been a warm-up, as I and others maintain, what on earth might the legal world look like in the long-term? What can we learn from the dramatic change in landscape over the last 30 years, with the benefit of hindsight, that can help us navigate the years ahead? These are questions I try to answer in the new version of the book.
For this special edition, we’ve reproduced the original text in full. Writing in the knowledge of how the story of legal technology actually unfolded, I’ve added an overall analysis of the main themes of THE FUTURE OF LAW. In the same vein, I’ve also provided a chapter-by-chapter commentary. And in a new opening essay, I bring together and consolidate my 45 years of writing on the impact of digital technology on the law – my latest thinking and a synthesis of my past work.
