Jusletter IT

The work expected of the legal profession and the education of its practitioners has undergone significant changes, and these continue as we speak. If nothing else, the development of the constitutional state has forced lawyers to abandon the outmoded notion of a legal education as training to become a judge. In the modern European constitutional state, law figures ever earlier in all operations. There is no denying that the fair trial is an important institution, but it now figures less prominently in the legal education. What we see more of today in practice and in legal training is a focus on the legal planning of the different processes by which society functions. Lawyers are – they should be – the professionals to take charge of such planning.
A second essential change that has occurred is the transition to the digital Network Society. Our commitment to technological change has propelled the environment in which we work forward, beyond the Information Society and e-government. Legal life, like society at large, now operates in a digital environment, relying as it does on information systems, digital information, data repositories and information networks. This change has had far-reaching repercussions on the way lawyers work as a profession. Its impact on the legal education should be equally profound. At present, there is a poor fit between traditional legal training and modern needs.
The changed environment in which we work has prompted discussion of «digital lawyers». The term is meant to evoke a group of lawyers who have special expertise in digitality, much like computer lawyers had in their day. There is no doubt that such expertise is needed. For example, from the outset information systems and software should be planned as a joint effort of IT professionals and digital lawyers. In the Network Society, with its characteristic juridification, more such specialized digital lawyers will be needed. The legal profession is changing to encompass a broader spectrum of duties.
However, it is essential to observe that more is involved here than a need for specialization. We are all in fact digital lawyers. We cannot circumvent the demands that the constitutional state and the digital Network Society place on us to augment our professional skill set. We need look no further than information security and personal data protection to realize that we are all digital lawyers: the fundamental interplay of the two impacts virtually all aspects of legal information processing and communication. Being a good lawyer in the legal Network Society automatically means being a digital lawyer.
The article examines a number of the crucial changes occasioned by the digital Network Society where the skills required of the legal profession are concerned. The scope of the paper precludes a discussion of the changes that will reduce the need for lawyers providing basic services. These include the increased availability of legal information on networks and citizens' improved opportunities to handle their affairs online.