Richard shook his head at how things had changed since he started in security at the courthouse decades ago. Standing in the back of the courtrooms, watching the litigants come and go, gave Richard a good picture of the changes. A few things remained the same, like the debt collectors rushing in with their slim files for another pile of worthless judgments out of which to try to squeeze some juice. But the courthouse was seeing many fewer prisoners. Most of the arraignments were now video feeds of the drunk-driving arrestees from the jail. An endless parade of no-fault divorces and child custody and support disputes had filled the courthouse void. Cases involving technology, like identity theft, online fraud, and social media defamation, were new to the courthouse. Richard missed the old mix of home burglaries, shoplifting, and boundary disputes.
Trends
Trends in law can be important. Commerce, culture, society, and technology all change quickly. Law changes with them, responding to their change while injecting its own new variables. Some legal issues, tools, and resolutions remain the same, but other legal affairs change either subtly or vastly. The rise of no-fault divorce, wage-earner plans in bankruptcies, no-fault motor-vehicle laws, and the limited-liability company are examples from decades ago of vast changes in how law addressed important and common issues. The expansion in the number of classes or categories that anti-discrimination law protects, the laws requiring disability accommodations in schools and workplaces, and environmental laws and regulations are other examples of whole new legal regimes emerging in the past few decades with widespread effects. Trends in law can affect your legal affairs. Watch for them as they emerge. Here are a few trends that might be your next legal issue.
Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the latest new wave of technology, and it looks to be a big one. Lawyers, law firms, and judges are using artificial intelligence to aid legal research and drafting, and speed or streamline administrative systems. But clients are using AI tools, too. Law codes and cases were once hidden away in libraries for lawyers and law clerks to laboriously peruse. Subscription services then uploaded them to databases for law firms to license and search at substantial expense but significantly greater ease and efficiency. Most law codes and cases are now readily available online, free to anyone. AI tools, though, are harvesting online information, not so much codes and cases but instead lawyer marketing materials, to answer legal questions that non-lawyers pose. Clients are going to lawyers with what they believe to be the answers, when the answers may be very different because of the local law or peculiarities of the case. Legal information is far more readily available. Legal insight and wisdom is still rare. Do your online research. But beware your results. Get qualified legal representation on important issues.
Detection
Artificial intelligence is having other impacts on law and legal affairs. Police and regulators once used their own observation to detect legal issues. Police would patrol the streets on the lookout for traffic violations and suspicious activity suggestive of crime. Government agencies would send out their inspectors to plants and businesses, to walk around looking for regulatory violations. Video surveillance of public walks and streets, and online regulatory reviews, gradually replaced some of the patrols and inspections. But police or inspectors still had to watch the video monitors or scroll through the online information. Yet surveillance systems are now using AI tools to monitor video feeds to generate alerts of law-breaking or suspicious materials. Officers no longer need to walk the beat or drive the route, relying instead on AI video-surveillance alerts. And agencies are using AI tools to continuously mine online data for regulatory alerts. Detection of illegal or anomalous activity is far easier, even automatic. You might now drive across the state unimpeded by lurking squad cars, only to find out later that you’ve gotten a slew of AI-generated speeding tickets. Or you might now get an AI-generated regulatory citation without ever seeing or hearing from an inspector. Beware engaging in anything crossing the lines of legality. Big brother may be watching.
Privacy
Walk across a school campus, down your town’s main street and into a retail shop, or into any publicly accessible building, and chances are good that you are under continuous video surveillance with AI tools flagging anomalous activity. Video surveillance is even common around private residences. And the video isn’t just going deep into a computer server somewhere for storage. Just look online, and you’ll see surveillance video of criminal activity, accidents, or crazy or embarrassing events in public and private spaces, instantly shared worldwide on social media. Privacy laws once kept a reasonable lid on things. You could generally keep your most private things confidential, even if it took a lawyer’s cease-and-desist letter to the neighbor or retraction demand to the local newspaper. No more. Your new legal challenge is to somehow hold the whole surveillance network and internet accountable for your privacy. And that’s unlikely to happen, making your damage remedies more significant. Buckle up and button down the hatches against the surveillance storm. Keep your private things private.
Data
The same trend toward capturing everything that is going on to put it online is affecting your private data. Your medical records were once on paper in a manila folder in a storage room at your physician’s office. No more. They’re now online. And once something is online, it’s soon reasonably likely to be available to someone who shouldn’t be accessing it. The same thing is true for your financial records, business records, school records, tax returns, electronic communications, and any other record of your interests and activities. The whole world is online. Yet hacking of online records and mistaken data releases are rampant. Law is responding with tightening data-privacy laws. You may not be able to keep every private record secure online. But you and others may, individually or more likely through class actions, be able to hold responsible for your damages those who mistakenly release confidential records or purposely share them without your authorization. And you may be able to re-secure the records with court orders. Monitor your data privacy.
Constitution
As governments increasingly deploy AI-driven surveillance tools, they increasingly affect your constitutional rights to freedom of religion, free speech, expression, and association, rights to travel and privacy, and other life, liberty, and property rights. Government development and deployment of bioweapons, AI-driven drone technology, genetic engineering, military and law enforcement robotics, geoengineering methods, and other technologies create vast new challenges to individual privacy and security, and family rights and interests. Government ordering all Americans restricted to their homes for months at a time and coercively injected with a genetically engineered drug, destroying lives, relationships, businesses, and communities, is no longer a crazed conspiracy theory but instead a recent reality. Constitutional rights turned back the government’s recent vast assault on individual liberties. Prepare to exercise those same rights once again.
Actions
The world increasingly moves in connected systems. With the ubiquity of the internet, transactions and interests don’t seem so individual any more. If the privacy invasion, rights violation, or consumer fraud is happening to you, it’s probably happening to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of others, too. Law has long made class actions available to consumers with common claims. Class actions enable many claimants to gather their claims into one case, sharing the costs of investigating and pursuing their claims against one or more defendants. Class actions can be powerful tools in correcting injustices and enforcing remedies. Class actions are also on the rise due to the wide reach that the internet gives to wrongdoers. As business and commercial interests grow more sophisticated, they concentrate in fewer numbers with greater reach. Financial institutions engaging in sharp practices, retailers defrauding customers, and other wrongdoers using the digital world to extend their reach remain accountable to consumers through class actions. If you are a victim of consumer fraud, consider joining a class action for a remedy and to put a stop to the wrongdoing.
Giving
After changes in the tax laws years ago gave rise to tax-advantaged employee retirement plans, Americans now hold trillions of dollars in tax-advantaged retirement accounts. With the population’s aging, account holders will soon be taking billions of dollars in required minimum distributions (RMDs) from those accounts and, in many cases, incurring significant income tax liabilities as they do so. Tax laws, though, encourage account holders to donate qualifying distributions to charities to avoid the tax liability. Retirees will be finding new incentive to donate to charity, while taking due advantage of existing tax laws. Retirees will need to ensure that their distributions and donations qualify for those tax advantages and are sensible, considering their other legal and financial interests. If you are among the millions of Americans with tax-advantaged retirement accounts, prepare to pursue a tax and giving strategy that makes the best sense to you and most benefits your community.
Guardianship
With the nation’s aging population, law should see a vast increase in matters involving elder needs. Guardianships for the elderly, typically managed by an adult child, can help the elderly remain more independent, delaying the move to expensive and discomfiting institutional care. A conservatorship through which the responsible adult child can manage the elderly parent’s financial and legal affairs can do likewise. Guardianships and conservatorships may work best with a responsible adult child in charge, but many aging individuals won’t have the convenience and assurance of a responsible adult child available to them. Law will increasingly need to identify qualified professional guardians and conservators, while monitoring their performance. Pressures already exist to corporatize and monetize the guardianship role, turning it from a personal relationship between a trusted professional guardian and the elderly ward, into big business. Allegations are already prominent that guardianship services prey on vulnerable elderly individuals to institutionalize them in order to earn more-substantial fees while raiding their assets. Beware the issues surrounding elderly guardianships, and prepare to address them securely.
Reflection
Which of the above trends are most likely to affect your interests or the interests of your family members? Have you seen an impact from AI tools yet? Are you aware that you are frequently under surveillance? Could surveillance create legal or privacy issues for you? Is your online data secure? What online records would be most damaging to you if inadvertently disclosed or deliberately hacked? Can you better secure or delete those records? Where is government intrusion most likely to affect you? Are you nearing retirement, with retirement accounts on which to draw? Do you understand the legal restrictions on and tax treatment of those accounts, including the advantages of qualified charitable contributions? Could you or one of your family members benefit from a guardianship or conservatorship? How can you respond to minimize the potential negative impact of these trends? What other trends do you see coming that may affect your legal affairs?
Key Points
Trends in society translate into trends in the law to watch for effects.
Artificial intelligence is increasing access to legal information.
Artificial intelligence is also increasing detection of wrongdoing.
Surveillance systems are affecting privacy rights, needing remedy.
Online recordkeeping is leading to increased data privacy violations.
Government surveillance is also increasing, affecting personal rights.
Class actions are rising to address broader consumer rights issues.
Retirees facing required minimum distributions need tax advice.
An aging population will need guardianships and conservatorships.