Legal tech, most agree, is transforming litigation and law practice, and its steady advance has tapped a rich vein of anxiety about the future of the legal profession. Much of the resulting debate has a defensive quality in its focus on what legal tech portends for the professional authority, and profitability, of lawyers. Much of it is also profoundly futurist—full of references to “robolawyers” and “robojudges.”

Lost in this rush to foretell a distant, robotic future are an array of more concrete and more pressing concerns: What is the current state of legal tech and where can it plausibly go in the near- to medium-term? What effect will legal tech’s continued advance—from e-discovery to outcome prediction engines to virtual trials and proceedings—have on core features of our litigation system, and how should our procedural rules adapt in response? How can new digital technologies expand access to justice for low- and moderate-income individuals who often cannot retain counsel or lack the resources or know-how to engage formal legal institutions? And what aspects of judicial administration—particularly data infrastructure and accessibility—need to change in order to promote fair and responsible development of legal technologies and open the doors of justice wider for all? Debate around each of these questions, already heated, is quickening in light of the deep disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.