“The truth is, the end never comes for anything. There is no way to fix this weary world so it will stay and still be right. As long as the world shall last, there will be wrongs, and if no man objected, and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever. The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along”.
-- Clarence Darrow, July 1920
As technological change accelerates, we face unprecedented complexity in human systems. Legal systems, historically our tools for managing societal change, must evolve to meet these challenges. Building trustworthy legal systems requires understanding four key principles: (1) legal technology is a unified field where all participants – from lawyers to engineers – are system builders; (2) aligning our intelligence with our values demands continuous adaptation, not one-time solutions; (3) legal systems must be designed to grow stronger from disruption, not merely survive it; and (4) legal systems should be measured by their effectiveness in addressing societal wrongs, not just their operational efficiency.
Let's elaborate.
Legal Technology Is a Unified Field
The modern world is changing at an astonishing pace. Supply chains shift overnight, global markets rise and fall in minutes, and algorithmic decisions guide daily life in ways both visible and invisible. As this momentum accelerates, we face unprecedented complexity in how humans organize — at work, online, and in every sphere of social life. Legal systems are our primary technologies for tackling the challenges arising from these conditions, because they were designed to resolve conflicts and direct human behavior.
Yes, legal systems are technologies. Adopting this view means that legal technology and legal systems are actually synonymous. Legal technology becomes more than a buzzword: it is a unified field that cuts across disciplines. From litigators and transactional attorneys to engineers and alignment specialists, we are all architects of adaptive legal systems. A plaintiff's attorney briefing a class action, a transactional lawyer conducting due diligence before a corporate merger, an engineer ensuring the alignment of a new agentic system – all are building and adapting technology that helps human organizations discover, assess and address wrongs, whether those wrongs are current or potential, individual or systemic.
When Clarence Darrow defended the Communist Labor Party in 1920, he declared a fundamental truth about legal systems: 'As long as the world shall last, there will be wrongs.' This wasn't an admission of defeat, but a profound insight into how legal systems actually work. Every injustice begins as a wrong – an action that violates our moral principles. When such a wrong persists unaddressed, we call it injustice. When the system successfully addresses that wrong, we achieve justice. The speed and effectiveness of this response is what separates a just legal system from an unjust one.
This understanding is particularly relevant as we confront anxieties about the new wave of intelligence supposedly ending professions or solving all human problems. The reality is more nuanced: advanced technology isn’t eliminating problems altogether – it’s expanding our capacity to identify and address them more effectively. Just as microscopes didn't end biology but revealed entire new worlds to study, this current wave of intelligence is revealing previously invisible or non-existent challenges and complexities.
Aligning Our Intelligence with Our Values Demands Continuous Adaptation
The discourse around AI safety or alignment often seeks a definitive solution – a perfect set of rules, a perfect system of constraints that will guarantee AI is aligned with human values and objectives. But this mirrors the same flawed thinking that has challenged legal systems throughout history: the belief that we can create perfect, unchanging frameworks. Just as justice requires constant adaptation to new wrongs, AI alignment demands continuous evolution of our oversight systems. It’s up to technologists to build legal systems that can discover, assess, and address new forms of harm as they emerge, while remaining flexible enough to adapt as our understanding of both technological capabilities and societal needs deepens. The goal isn't to solve alignment once and for all, but to create robust systems for maintaining it as technology evolves.
Karl Popper's work on open societies provides the theoretical framework for understanding this dynamic. Societies advance not through reaching a static perfect state, but through systems that effectively process and respond to change. An open society enables constant change, essentially allowing wrongs to occur. But rather than being destroyed by this – open societies gain from disorder. Legal technology, properly understood, is exactly such a system – not a fixed solution but an evolving set of tools and frameworks for addressing an ever evolving scope of social wrongs.
In practice, alignment means building structures — both legal and technical — that are designed to continually learn from their interactions with the real world. We won’t be able to ensure that every use of AI in production won’t create wrongs. But if we scale our legal technology, we will be able to create a governance model where AI actively becomes more attuned to human needs. Rather than quashing every disruptive force, we leverage those disruptions to refine our frameworks, ensuring that our intelligence — human or artificial — never loses sight of our shared values.
Legal Systems Must Be Designed to Grow from Disorder
Looking forward, humans will have more than just national legal systems. Every form of organization will operate their own legal system, each interacting with and being held accountable by other legal systems. Legal systems will incorporate cutting-edge intelligence, and align with the organization’s goals and strategy, as well as with the standards of multiple national legal systems.
This evolution demands more than just resilience – it requires legal systems that gain from disorder. While legal systems have always adapted through case-by-case learning, tomorrow's systems must do more. First and foremost, such systems will integrate more proactive and real-time feedback loops.
Continuous compliance monitoring is one example. Adaptive legal systems scan emerging case law, market signals, social media conversations and their entire environment for early signs of potential risk. This kind of early detection allows policymakers and stakeholders to find legal problems before they find them, and adapt.
In similar fashion, dynamic rulemaking and amendments will become common practice for adaptive legal systems. When change is constant, the law can only freeze for so long. Instead of waiting for a high-profile lawsuit or legislative session, legal frameworks could be updated incrementally, in smaller cycles. Like agile software development, these cycles would incorporate lessons from recent disputes or newly discovered risks, helping systems effectively enforce the law on the go.
Redundancy is also crucial for the legal systems of tomorrow. This is true for every facet of the system, from diverse dispute resolution mechanisms that cover for each other, to regulatory overlaps that act as a safety net for blind spots, all the way to expanding circles of influence that affect the law - making impact more accessible to people from diverse backgrounds and disciplines.
Again, the goal isn't to build a perfect, static system that merely resists shocks – it's to create one that harnesses disorder and change as fuel for improvement. Leaders who understand this will build organizations and systems that gain from volatility, while those fixated purely on efficiency metrics will create rigid structures that eventually shatter under pressure. The most enduring legal systems won't be those that try to prevent all disorder, but those designed to transform society's stresses and challenges into greater capability for changing tomorrow.
Legal Systems Should Be Measured by Their Effectiveness in Addressing Societal Wrongs, Not Just Their Operational Efficiency
Legal technologists need to look beyond speed and cost-efficiency. While those metrics have their place — no one wants a system that is unnecessarily slow or expensive — they often obscure the deeper question: Does this system effectively identify and resolve the underlying wrongs, and does it improve people’s lives in the process?
In concrete terms, it’s tempting to applaud any initiative that “saves time” or “cuts administrative work” for practitioners. But these are merely symptoms of a larger design. The core function of any legal process is to deliver justice — to protect rights, resolve disputes, or clarify responsibilities in ways that benefit society at large. If speeding up an old, cumbersome procedure only amplifies its flaws, we’ve missed a critical opportunity to address those shortcomings at their roots.
Consider the example of a will-processing system. Improving efficiency might mean creating faster queues or automating some paperwork. Yet we rarely stop to ask the more fundamental questions: Why are we seeing so many rush requests in the first place? What structural issues are causing delays in inheritances or estate distributions? By tackling these root causes — perhaps through better estate planning in systems, more proactive communication, or alternative dispute resolution — a system can become both more effective and more humane. In other words, we transform “time saved” into “problems solved.”
In other words, building legal systems demands product thinking, not just engineering efficiency. Like great products, effective legal systems must deeply understand and serve their users’ needs while continuously evolving. This approach sees beyond pure optimization to focus on real human impact. Underpinning this mindset shift is the concept of adaptive architecture: identify the root causes of problems, and the underlying value that needs to be delivered to beneficiaries; iterate and refine both the rules and the technology behind them; and measure meaningful outcomes and value, as opposed to the standard efficiencies.
Conclusion
In this era of unprecedented technological acceleration, we need to harness legal technology to create legal systems we can trust. Building trustworthy legal systems requires understanding four key principles: (1) legal technology is a unified field where all participants – from lawyers to engineers – are system builders; (2) aligning our intelligence with our values demands continuous adaptation, not one-time solutions; (3) legal systems must be designed to grow stronger from disruption, not merely survive it; and (4) legal systems should be measured by their effectiveness in addressing societal wrongs, not just their operational efficiency. I’ll elaborate.
Clarence Darrow’s reminder that “wrongs” will always emerge is a call to build legal systems capable of evolving alongside society, harnessing each new wave of change to achieve something closer to justice. I hope these principles serve as a good foundation for your work, and I hope you succeed.