> As can the insistence to treat every social and moral issue as newly discovered

I think this is more a quality of hackers than a quality of the CS-crowd, though they often go hand-in-hand. Hackers looking into any field will treat it as if it's never been discovered before; trying to build the field again from first principles.

That's interesting, though. What are your thoughts on AI+law 10, 20 years from now? How do you lawyer colleagues feel about your specialization?

Yes, fair observation. The hacker mentality is a good way to describe it.

I think AI will keep us very busy over the next decade. There are a lot of individual issues of a legal nature where AI creates some non-trivial challenges (equality, privacy, intellectual property) and there’s also some more fundamental themes which challenge some of the liberal underpinnings of our legal system. There’s a lot of hyperbole around AI but at least some of the wild predictions of change will probably bear out in practice.

I think that my colleagues see the value in the advice I give; either that or they’re too polite to tell me otherwise. Clients seem happy to pay for the advice, which is a good indicator, although I now work in-house because in private practice it is a difficult area to scale. (This is more a reflection on how much of private practice has become about leveraging a lean team of junior lawyers to transactional work at bulk scale; even multi-million dollar corporate M&A or real estate deals can be very repetitive in nature. AI will eventually eat this type of work. Ref: Richard Susskind.)

There’s still a bit of scepticism that tech is a standalone discipline. I can see the argument both ways. I believe that it is helpful to have lawyers who understand all of the legal implications of e.g. AI, across multiple legal disciplines, and so can give general counsel. I practice elements of privacy, IP, contract, discrimination, regulatory law etc. etc. all as they affect tech. On the other hand, there are situations where it might be better to have deeply specialist advice with a tech overlay. Where necessary, I will partner with my colleagues. The idea is that the client gets legal advice that is correct both as a matter of law and on application to the technology they are working on.