Innovating Justice to redefine legal practice

Dear Rookie Advocate,

I wrote this post with a specific objective in mind: to inspire action in the areas of social justice, digital transformation, innovation, and sustainability. While this may differ from what you are accustomed to reading here, I hope to provide a clear and concise summary that prompts further action.

Let’s begin by discussing the need for social justice. Father Luigi Taparelli, who first used the term “social justice,” believed that in addition to doing what is right, we should work to improve the lives of others. As lawyers, many of you likely entered this profession to serve the underprivileged, including the elderly, people with disabilities, children, and impoverished individuals in our society. However, more than 10 million Zambians live in poverty, affecting their access to the legal system and their exercise of political power. The social and legal needs of the poor are often denied due to their alienation from the process of drafting laws and public policies, which prevents them from influencing political agendas. Although law school, ZIALE, and the legal industry may have in some way altered your idealism, it’s essential to remember that the poor’s capacity to survive and thrive depends on their ability to meet their legal needs. Lawyers are equipped with the skills to analyze laws and regulations critically and deal with complicated social problems, making them crucial to fostering social justice.

Social justice is about improving access, equity, participation, diversity, and human rights. We can use technology to bridge this gap.

So, what is legal tech, and what is its purpose? The practice of law involves business processes, and legal tech tries to speed up the “business of law’s” digital transformation. Digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation are three distinct ideas that work together to bring about this shift. Digitization refers to converting a handwritten police report from a physical state to a digital one. At the same time, digitalization involves preserving digital records of court cases rather than using paper. However, digital transformation is about redesigning the legal system through various technologies. Legal technology (legal-tech) refers to “the use of technology and software to provide legal services” and is generally associated with startups founded to disrupt the traditionally conservative legal market. Legal tech should be more than just digitizing physical aspects of the legal system or computerizing cumbersome processes. Instead, it should use technology to change how we administer justice.

But how can digital transformation “innovate” the justice system? Innovation is a process, not a singular event or phenomenon, and it’s about how we create value from ideas. In the case of legal tech, innovation may start with an idea about how we can use technology to change the legal sector, developing a technology that improves how people access lawyers, and marketing and commercializing that technology. Companies (and people) innovate to introduce new things (radical innovation) to an industry or to change existing things within the industry (incremental innovation). We can use technology to transform the way we administer justice by altering the product/services we offer to people seeking legal solutions, the process of lawyering, the way legal services are positioned in the market, and the paradigm in which they are understood.

To conclude, the legal industry needs a paradigm shift, and we can use technology to make that happen. By embracing innovation and digital transformation, we can make legal services more accessible, efficient, and practical, ultimately fostering social justice and a free and just society.

Mubita is a doctoral researcher in Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences with expertise in sustainable innovation. He is working on the EU-funded URBANE project, which aims to develop sustainable food systems in the Global South by applying agroecological principles in the business model innovation process.