Well students, today I have with me as my guest Maurits Barendrecht who is the research
director of the Hague Institute for innovation in the law and is also a Professor of law
at Tilburg University.
Maurits, thanks for joining me.
Thanks for inviting me and its great to be in Melbourne.
Well Maurits, at HiiL, you have in effect invented if you like, an online dispute resolution
service in family law.
Can you really resolve family law disputes online?
At least you can support the parties having such a dispute very well online.
We all know the divorces, its a very messy and complicated reorganisation of your life
and IT is great in restructuring a process and that is what we do.
What do you think the future then, is for online dispute resolution, more generally?
Its hard to predict the future but you can see some things from our application that
is interesting.
IT gives you the possibility to ask people questions and organise their thoughts issue
by issue and you can give them legal information about the precise rules exactly when they
are dealing with that issue.
So the future might look like legal information being much closer to the real end uses of
the system, so that changes the role of lawyers.
Can I ask you, how do you think it will change the role of lawyers and judges and what does
it mean more specifically for access to justice?
We think that the role of lawyers will change more into the direction of bridge builders.
you see a movement towards a neutral role of lawyers or more neutral roles of lawyers
being highly appreciated.
SO IT might help people who seek access to justice to organise their thoughts, their
needs, their emotions.
And then bring it to a platform to lawyers who help them to sort out the most difficult
issues.
What then do you think the implications with IT and online dispute resolution will be for
the way we actually teach law in our law schools?
Its great that you have introduced design thinking in your program.
If you think about the future of law it will be probably much more user oriented.
So, being able to design a great customer journey for people having legal problems,
thats a great future for lawyers.
And thats very high value work.
Ok so, what then do you think will be the new skill set required for lawyers in the
21st century?
It will be enormously important to really connect to the needs of your client groups
and to be able to skill that to see that each case is individually different, to see the
patterns in the cases.
To see what actually are the underlying needs of people when they go to a lawyer and not
think about it from the perspective of the law but from peoples needs and then build
good solutions from there using best practices from all over the world.
Why do we only use the laws of a given country?
Why dont we use the best practices from lawyers, mediators, judges all over the world when
they actually deliver the law?
Ok, last question, if you had one piece of advice for our law students who are watching
this, what would that piece of advice be?
Dont take law too seriously.
I know that they require knowledge at exams but laws can easily be researched now with
the greatest artificial intelligence tools.
So press your professors to teach you the general patterns in problems, how to see them
and how to build great solutions for people.
Because people will always and increasingly need a good ordering of their relationships.
Thats the value you have to see in your own profession.
Well there you go students, some great advice.
Putting design thinking and putting the client at the centre is the key and trying to resolve
their problems is absolutely crucial for the work that youre going to do.
Thanks for joining me.