Miscellaneous

A Law Firm Run by Two Robots?

By Robert Ambrogi

Will there ever come a day when robots will replace lawyers? Judging by the website of the firm Robot Robot & Hwang, that day has already arrived.  The two senior partners in the three-member firm are both computers, one named Apollo Cluster and the other named Daria XR-1029.

According to his bio, Cluster “has processed more than 10 million unique transactions for clients” and is a frequent speaker “on the topic of the obsolescence of humans in legal practice.” He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and former clerk for 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner.

XR-1029 specializes in IP issues “and has handled hundreds of thousands of complex commercial transactions for Internet and other technology companies. She has her law degree from UC-Berkeley’s Boalt School of Law and an LLM from Stanford, where she published the article, “On the Computational Predictability of the Judicial Process.”

Drawing its inspiration from Lawrence Lessig and Richard Susskind, the firm’s purpose is to “think about legal systems as technical ones and, in doing so, draw on a rich tradition of nerdery and hacker ethos.”

The one non-robot member of the firm is Tim Hwang, who appears to be the true brains behind Robot Robot & Hwang. Although not a lawyer in real life, Hwang is a former research associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and founder of the Internet culture conference ROFLCon.

No word on why Hwang launched this site, but he is listed as owner of the domain name, with a mailing address at Harvard’s Eliot House.

A shout-out to Robert Richards for bringing this to my attention.

Full post as published by Lawsites on July 19, 2010 (boomark / email).