IN a world where artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to cut half a lawyer’s workload and machine learning threatens the profession’s existence in a decade, there is still a country where you need to mail in a photograph in a maroon tie to qualify for the bar. Not red. Not burgundy. Maroon. This raises questions.

Firstly, who makes these fashion choices? Secondly, while the young Pakistani finds a tie, poses for a picture, prints it out, and has their documents transported to the capital city to be physically reviewed, what are the rest of the world’s lawyers doing? Spending some extra time on a bureaucratic hurdle is miniscule- but when a process of seconds is needlessly extended to hours, it serves as a fitting metaphor for the priorities of the system, or lack thereof. The times they are a-changin, those priorities need to keep up, and the deeper you look, the further the discrepancies unravel.

Legal reforms can be divided into the obvious and the not so obvious. The former: don’t attack hospitals, among other things. The latter: fix the institutional problems that hold our people back. A thinly veiled secret narrated by senior lawyers is that much of its absurdity isn’t a shortcoming. It can be deliberate. Aside from bureaucratic inertia, one could argue that law in Pakistan is uniquely positioned to revel in its own madness. At least some of this is attributable to the underlying philosophy: if things weren’t confusing, your clients wouldn’t need to pay you to make sense of them. More blatant is the idea that law graduates are softened by loose academic standards and need a proper baptism by fire to be any good.

The fact that suo motu notice was taken to address poor quality education at local law colleges is testament to the notion that for whatever reason, the new kids on the job aren’t very bright. Maybe jumping through a few extra hoops would do them some good. What this ignores though, is that a large chunk of the profession — the well-connected second- and third-generation lawyers —will have people to guide them through every step of the process. It’s the beginners, those without the privileges of network, not welcomed into the tight folds of the legal ‘fraternity’, and most importantly the women, who will suffer disproportionately from needless obstacles. Further, one would assume that challenging graduates on academics would be more useful than on their ability to procure coloured neckties.

Take another example: digitisation reforms in courts. Recent proposals have been met with staunch opposition. Fair, given that beyond lawyers, every cog in the legal machine has done things one way for decades. To abruptly declare that the days of the dusty case files are numbered, and folks better learn to code or hit the road wouldn’t be reasonable.

There’s one problem. In recent years, data scientists have looked to machine learning (a leading branch of AI), and come to a realisation — it’s a lawyer. While the latter uses coded instructions to make decisions, ML systems look to precedents. Tell it to play chess and it will scour the greatest games ever played to devise its strategy. Tell it to prepare a contract and it will read through a global database, teach itself the rules, and hand you a finished product in seconds.

London law firms are already having AI systems review every document an associate prepares before it reaches a client. It’s only a matter of time before those same systems are crunching the numbers of Balochistan’s tax law. Once that time comes, you can protest all you want. Storm the nearest computer lab and beat up the programmers. It won’t hinder the client’s ability to bypass the archaic systems we have built and get their job done by someone willing to embrace the inevitable.

When confron­ted with an oncoming tidal wave, you have choices. Stand your ground and hope it won’t sweep you off your feet. Attempt to ride along when it arri­ves and see where it takes you. Or anticipate its arrival and create your own wave.

The foremost example of a wave creator is Vakeel Online, a multifaceted digital legal marketplace with over 20,000 members connecting those seeking justice to those who can provide it. Barriers to entry separate young lawyers, women, and those lacking connections from a client base in pursuit of their skillsets. Digitisation connects them.

Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant, and its only when you take ideas out of closed-door discussions and into vigorous public debate that law truly becomes accessible. It’s these platforms’ media wings that make that possible. And when the tidal wave of AI finally strikes at Pakistan’s shores, it’ll be platforms like this that are ready to brave the storm and thrive. And once the storm has settled, a new generation of lawyers will emerge, sporting ties that are maroon and every other shade they can conceive, ready to embrace the future.

The writer is a lawyer and columnist from Okara. He graduated from SOAS.

Twitter: @hkwattoo1

Published in Dawn, September 12th, 2021