On the third and final morning of LegalTech New York 2010, Squire Sanders Dempsey partner Brian Starer stood in a crowded ballroom and worried aloud about the future of his profession. “I spent the first five years of my practice in dusty libraries, combing through Lloyd’s Registers and case law,” the New York-based maritime casualty lawyer said. “Lawyers today spend five minutes on Westlaw or LexisNexis to come up with their answers,” but they don’t have the deep knowledge that comes from careful and lengthy study of decisions written by the legal greats like Learned Hand, Starer lamented. “My intuition is pretty good, but I’ve been doing this for 40 years. How do we make sure the next generation gets it?”
The question came near the end of Wednesday’s keynote presentation in the grand ballroom of the Hilton New York, billed as “I3: The New Convergence of Intelligence, Intuition and Information.” Seated at a table on stage, Thomson Reuters Chief Strategy Officer David Craig pondered the question, along with Malcolm Gladwell, author of recent books concerning intuition — “Blink” and “ The Tipping Point” — and Dr. Lisa Sanders, a medical columnist for The New York Times whose work was the inspiration for the TV drama “House,” featuring an irascible doctor who falls back on intuition in making his brilliant diagnoses.
