On my first day of law school, I heard the repeated cliché that law school teaches you to “think like a lawyer.” Not one of my classmates knew what it meant. It just seemed like something to say.

But I now know that the saying has real meaning — and it is at the heart of why the legal profession is in so many ways far behind. To “think like a lawyer” means to base your thinking on precedent and history. Ideas and customs are presumptively good because they exist; the longer it’s been that way, the harder it is to change. As a profession, we’re bad at deviating from the course because we’re trained to do precisely the opposite. The bar for change is staggeringly high.

Legal technology and the tortoise

Basing past decisions on precedent and history is usually a good thing in the law. You want both your lawyer and the law to be stable and predictable. But it comes at a cost: innovation is slow to take hold in the legal profession.

Indeed, slowing the pace of technological innovation has in some cases been fully embraced by the legal profession. In Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts’ recent report on the federal judiciary, he uses the fable of the tortoise and the hare to recommend the “deliberate” pace at which courts adopt new technology. And this isn’t the first time the fable was invoked positively by the judiciary; sculptures of the tortoise and the hare are perched atop the Supreme Court building just above its imposing columns. According to Justice Roberts, the courts “have proceeded cautiously when it comes to adopting new technologies” and have chosen “to be late to the harvest of American ingenuity.”

The hare on the far-left of the Supreme Court’s east pediment. The tortoise is on the far-left.

The analogy would work if we were, like the tortoise, “winning the race,” so to speak. To me, another principle is more applicable: “Justice delayed is justice denied.” The state of technology in law is dire, and it affects things as fundamental as access to the text of the law itself. The laws that every citizen is expected to abide are locked behind steep paywalls in expensive private databases. You can’t get access to court documents through the government’s PACER service without paying fees that add up quick. And the delivery of legal services is so expensive and inefficient that the average patent case costs $2.8 million, and only around 20% of people in state courts can afford to have a lawyer.

Open sourcing the law

All this is happening when spreading information more efficiently has taken hold in every other corner of technology.

The internet has made possible an explosion of liberated information and knowledge creation.

Wikipedia is the greatest collection of human knowledge ever amassed; Twitter is the pulse of the world, communicating in real-time everything happening now; and I never go out to eat without checking Yelp. Even more amazingly, the software upon which most of the web runs is built using “open source” code — that is, software that was written for free by thousands of people, each doing their own part.

There is no legal analog to open source code; the collaboration and information sharing that has transformed nearly every other area of digital life is near-nonexistent in the law. Legal work and thinking is siloed, solitary, private — which means when you pay your lawyer to represent you, a large part of their time is spent doing redundant work and reaching the same conclusions as hundreds of others . There isn’t a shared pool of knowledge to tap into in the law.

You will be represented less well and for a greater expense than if we lived in a world where information was shared.

This is bad for everyone: lawyers, clients, and the public.

Think Different

Then how did I, trained to “think like a lawyer,” come to care? I don’t fit the typical profile of a lawyer: I grew up programming, and have been deeply immersed in coding culture for literally as far back as I can remember.

I had the good fortune of growing up in Silicon Valley at the dawn of the Internet. My dad started a web business in the early ‘90s in our garage. My family had an Atari, Apple II, and a Condor, and my garage was filled with Sun Unix servers. It was a playground for me to experiment, tinker, and build. To me, coding was magical; you could turn encoded computer instructions into fantastic graphics, games, or homework aids.

I’ve been hooked since then. Through law school, clerking, litigating — I’ve remained, in many ways first and foremost, a hacker at heart.

The hacker’s mindset is, in many ways, diametrically opposed to a lawyer’s.

I grew up next door to Apple’s headquarters, which at the time proudly displayed five-story tall banners that said “Think Different.” It was a simple statement, but the sentiment permeated the culture of the region. The culture of code is one of innovation, where the best ideas are in the future.

An example of Apple’s Think Different campaign that ran around 2000.

“Think Different” is a far cry from “think like a lawyer.” I entered the legal profession thinking more like a hacker than the attorney I was trained to be. And, after some time practicing as a lawyer, I did something un-lawyerlike. I broke with precedent and created something new: Casetext. Together with other lawyers and engineers, Casetext is bringing to the law the same principles that have liberated information and made possible massive collective efforts in every other area of knowledge.

Casetext takes a new approach to discovering and understanding legal information. We started by making U.S. law free, and we’ve put it on a platform that empowers attorneys to collaborate and share their insights about the law. Their contributions are linked to millions of judicial cases and statutes on a research platform that’s easy to use and free to the public. Roughly 250,000 users search the law on Casetext each month, and since we launched the website’s legal community architecture in late 2014, tens of thousands of attorneys are tapping Casetext’s network for insights related to their practice areas.

The logic behind this approach is simple. The old way of doing things misses the most valuable source of legal knowledge: the legal community itself. Lawyers already share insight about the law publicly to demonstrate thought leadership and grow their reputation. By creating a place to write commentary on the law linked to the resource people already use to find answers to their legal questions, we’re able to collaborate with the legal community to create an insightful, free resource for lawyers and the public. And we’re disrupting an $8 billion legal research market in the process.

A hacker’s approach to law

We’ve seen an explosion of interest in community-driven solutions to making law more widely accessible and understandable. But our effort is young, and we have a lot of room to grow; we have taken a few steps into a miles-long journey. We hope that as this movement grows, we’ll collectively build a resource that can lift the profession the same way open source coding has lifted the field of software.

The legal community isn’t fated to stagnation. “Thinking like a lawyer” doesn’t have to truncate innovation. Attorneys everywhere are committed to serving their clients well and using resources wisely, and there’s a widespread understanding that access to justice is a mission and a collective responsibility we all share. The challenge is how to promote innovation in the law without losing our distinctive commitment to certainty.

I don’t have all the answers, but I consider myself lucky to see the world through two very different but complementary lenses. As a hacker, I’m prone to push the envelope and try new things until finally we’ve found something better than the status quo. As a lawyer, I’m obligated to mitigate risks and protect predictability.

But I don’t think these two views of the world need to be at conflict; each has its proper place in the law. We need to “think like a lawyer” to protect our precedent-centered view of legal practice. At the same time, we must foster a future-oriented view of the profession. We can’t forego innovation in a $100 billion industry and legal system in which millions of people’s rights, money, and even freedom are at stake. There may be a place for the tortoise in the halls of the Supreme Court, but when it comes to ensuring that the legal profession is as efficient and effective as it ought to be, we need to finally think different.

This is what we’re doing at Casetext. If you want to join the effort, we’re hiring.