Legal Tech, the Law Firm and the Imagination of the Right Legal Answer

Legal tech is growing, and its growth provokes anxieties about the future of the legal profession as such. In this article, we examine the impact of legal tech on the central role of lawyers at law firms in crafting an imagined ‘right legal answer’ by drawing on Duncan Kennedy’s suggestion that a claim to the rightness of one’s legal propositions is a central characteristic of the legal profession. We first ask how changes in the organisation of legal services affect the ability of lawyers at law firms to produce that ‘right legal answer’. While legal tech only exacerbates already ongoing processes of eradication of routine tasks, we find that it continues to mask the role of ideology in arriving at a right legal answer under a new layer of technological projection. Second, we ask how lawyers’ ability to produce ‘the right legal answer’ is affected by, first, expert systems and, second, a legal tech application named Bryter, representing a no-code system. We find that expert systems do not permit to uphold the unity of the lawyer required for Kennedy’s model of the right legal answer, but that no-code systems as Bryter do so. No-code systems can be reduced to a slogan: Have the lawyer, but evict her ideological temptations more efficiently than before!


Introduction
The market for legal tech has expanded significantly in recent years, with the Covid-19 pandemic working as a catalyst (Wolters 2021). 1 Recently, the public launch of generative artificially intelligent technologies (ChatGPT, Bard, Ernie and others) have conjured the spectre of lawyers delegating the generation of textual reasoning to bots.This ongoing expansion is provoking scholarly examination of the impact of legal tech on the legal profession.How do new technological solutions impact the everyday practices of the law, and what does the digitised future -whose timing and scope are still under question -hold for lawyers both as a social and professional class?Hypotheses vary from the projection of a radical future in which the legal profession is no longer viable to accounts of a gradually transforming legal services practice in which lawyers remain essential (See Caserta and Madsen 2019).Or, indeed, in which lawyers are liberated, as suggested in the marketing prose of Bryter, a legal tech firm: No one goes to law school to copy and paste data from one document into another database.When tedious processes are automated, lawyers can put their focus on the fulfilling, interesting, and high-value work that drives them.(Bryter 2022) But how do we separate the 'tedious processes' from the 'fulfilling, interesting and high-value work' that 'drives' a lawyer working in a paradigmatic law firm?Or, put otherwise, how do we distinguish the automatable from the inherently human without harming the very value that legal work presumably adds?And who will do the work of separation and distinction, again without prejudicing the generation of this value?These overarching questions require an idea of how lawyers' professional work is imagined and how lawyers imagine in pursuit of their profession.This places the pursuit of our overarching questions squarely within the remit of this special issue, which is seized with the role technology plays in the transformation of legal imagination, including imaginations of the lawyer and the 'work that drives her', as much as the imaginative work done by the lawyer.
The imagination of the lawyer and what drives her cannot be taken for granted, as does the quote above.Following Kennedy (2014 and2017), we suggest that the production of the right legal answer or else making a claim to the rightness of one's legal propositions is a central characteristic of the legal profession, and that a question on how technology changes lawyers' roles and work will invariably touch upon that characteristic.With 'finding the right legal answer', we do not mean discovery of an answer which is right regardless of any given social context, and neither do we presuppose the existence of such an answer in all given cases.We also note that searching for such answers is not the central characteristic of all lawyerly assignments and all of the time.Such a task, as Kennedy (2017, p. 369) points out, con-cerns mostly judges, law professors and elite cause-lawyers and in cases that can be described as 'high-stakes' cases involving 'ideologically charged questions'.In line with Kennedy, we understand the right answer to be primarily an effect of a contentious argumentation, destabilisation of rival answers, or imposed by temporal or material limitations as well as that of the limitation of the field of interpretation itself.Arguably, this is a central element of the imaginative work done by the lawyer, and it figures centrally in imaginations of the lawyer as well.At its core is the lawyer's ability to separate legal from ideological argument.
However, we cannot take the imagination of the lawyer and what drives her as a constant.It changes as we change from a state obtaining before legal tech, which is the state that Kennedy's analysis is based on, to a state after the introduction of legal tech.Our article is seized with the interaction between these two processes of change: that of the lawyer and her work on one side, and that of technology on the other.
Historically, we track the changing imagining of lawyers' work in two recent episodes of legal tech development.In the first, a lower segment of legal services is automatised through the use of legal expert systems as part of a broader organisational readjustment logic.This episode is characterised by the outsourcing of control to both external experts in highly specialised legal domains and to system programmers.We then contrast that episode with one marked by the contemporary advent of no-code systems, permitting lawyers without programming skills to automate routine tasks.These, too, operate within the logic of organisational readjustment, yet they give a significant role to in-house lawyers in the automation process.We exemplify this countervailing development by drawing on Bryter, a no-code application marketed by the quote above.In its discursive practice, Bryter realises its claim of automation as liberation quite carefully: lawyers using it continue to retain a relationship to those 'tedious processes' deemed of low value.We are not suggesting that Bryter is paradigmatic for all legal tech today.What it does is to provide a productive litmus test to understand how lawyers' work may be imagined in the techno-capitalist reorganisation of legal work for which 'legal tech' is a shorthand.Also, in contrast to the more recent ChatGPT application, Bryter has been available since 2018.
We ask two questions that connect the overall development induced by the two episodes of legal tech development to the way lawyers' production of the right legal answer is imagined: • How do changes in the organisation of legal services affect lawyers' ability to produce 'the right legal answer'?• How do (a) expert systems and (b) Bryter as a no-code system affect the organisation of legal services, including lawyers' ability to produce 'the right legal answer'?
In responding to these questions, we focus on the lawyer working in a law firm, as the law firm has been framed by the legal tech discourse as the place where technological change is expected to play out.Today, far from all jurisdictions have embraced legal tech, why this lawyer is likely to be working in a tech-prone setting with an infrastructure that permits venturing into the domain of automation.The choices of this tech-enabled elite of sorts will be decisive globally, one way or another.
Section 2 introduces Kennedy's exploration of what drives the American lawyer, which provides a bottom line for the following analysis.Section 3 is devoted to organisational change and argues that the introduction of legal tech entails an exacerbation of an already ongoing process of de-professionalisation and the increased stratification of the practice of articulating the right legal answer.This provides a response to the first of our two research questions, one in which these organisational changes seem to threaten the production of the right legal answer in the way described by Kennedy but not from the standpoint of the legal tech.In Sect.4, we analyse change in the technological register, thereby responding to the second question.We contrast the top-down logic of expert systems with what appears to be the flattened logic of no-code systems, drawing on the example of Bryter.We find that platforms such as Bryter counterintuitively reinforce the traditional production of the right legal answer.Section 5 offers conclusions.

Automating the Right Legal Answer?
There is no legal tech that automates the task of legal service to the extent of providing ready-for-use legal solutions and answers, at least not in cases that carry a modicum of complexity and consequence.Arriving at the argument and the answer remains as a high-valued labour of human lawyers and their ability to reason creatively.In his 'A Social Psychological Interpretation of the Hermeneutic of Suspicion in Contemporary American Legal Thought', Duncan Kennedy engages with the parameters of arriving at legal answers.He suggests that the presupposition of the existence of a right answer in all possible legal cases is based upon an assumption that such an answer is free from 'the ideologically motivated legal errors ' (2017, p. 365).A similar assumption underpins the automation of legal service.The technological automation of finding legal solutions seems to require -at least at some level -that generally accepted right answers exist, which then can be reproduced by technology.In the labour of arguing and resolving a legal case, those parts not susceptible to ideological contamination are most readily automatable.
But is it at all possible to sever the legal and the ideological?In unpacking the relation of ideological motivation and the right legal answer, it is worthwhile to first ponder how elite cause-lawyers, law professors, and judges deal with it, a group that is in focus in Kennedy's analysis.It is a group that seems far removed from the routines of legal work that seem to be readily automatable, but, as we shall see, it is worthwhile to consider them first.Kennedy argues that lawyers experience the production of the right answer as 'ontologically unstable' and 'shaky'.The right legal answer is unstable because legal reasoning is highly path dependent.The choices of materials, cases, studies etc. in large part -and not exclusively -determine and orient the answers one experiences as legally correct (p.373).As 'the law cannot determine the proper direction of work' lawyers choose a starting point and adjust their strategy along the way in the hope of arriving at an answer that on the one hand pleases them ideologically and on the other holds up as a fully legal interpretation (p.374).These choices of pathways as unavoidable are 'prime plausible locations for covert ideological influence' (p.375).The right legal answer is also unstable because the lawyer experiences 'a conflict between what he actually believes and what he ought to say in order to have maximum effect on the audience' (p.317). 2  Following Kennedy, the lawyer copes with this role conflict through a mechanism of 'projective identification', tracking it back to Freud's analysis of jealousy as a coping mechanism.Invariably, the process of reaching a legal answer contains a legalist element and an ideological element.In her projective identification, the lawyer resolves the role conflict by preserving the legalist element for herself, while projecting the ideological element onto her opponent.The lawyer knows the temptation of ideology as a married partner knows the temptation of an infidel extramarital relation.By projecting the desire of infidelity onto the other, it is effectively externalised, and in so doing, the projecting party appears faithful to herself. 3 The lawyer, in turn, externalises the temptation of ideology by projecting it onto the opponent lawyer, stabilising a self-image as being faithful to the precepts of legalism.This mechanism is about how the lawyer is coping with the role conflict by reimagining her own work, and that of her opponent.It enables the lawyer to argue her legal answer with renewed vigour, as the destabilising element of ideology is evicted from it.
What to make of Kennedy's analytical framework in relation to legal tech?Solutions available on the market today focus predominantly on the automation of routine tasks from which lawyers need to be liberated.These are framed as non-imaginative and hence not prone to ideological considerations.What is easy to overlook here is the active role legal tech plays in the development of pathways to a legal argument by way of automation of legal search and case or argument discovery.Kennedy's observation that the path dependency of legal work contributes to its ontological instability would suggest that mundane and automatable tasks are also part and parcel of the ideological temptation that the lawyer is faced with.Not even routines at the lowest end of the creative spectrum are immune from ideology.A lawyer might look at the pathway chosen by an opponent lawyer in crafting an argument, and check that pathway for ideological aberrations from the formalist path.
This confronts us with the question whether legal tech can cope with the conflagration of legalism and ideology characteristic for the work of the lawyer and necessary to produce the right legal answer.In order to be sellable to lawyers, it would need to preserve the main tenets of projective identification.To see whether this is the 2 Here, it is important to note that the discussion regarding the ideologically bound character of the right legal answer does not mean that there can never exist situations where an answer could be reached merely based on the existing legal material, or that law is never sufficiently determinate regardless of the question or context.There are questions to which, as any good-faith actor would agree, wrong legal answers do exist.To make this point Kennedy (2017, p. 369) provides the basic example of denying voting rights at the polling station to a legally underage sixteen-year-old person.To recall, the context where the legal imagination of lawyers operates as a consequential requirement for finding the right legal answers is that of ideologically consequential questions. 3 Kennedy explains the concept of projective identification by drawing on a 1922 text by Sigmund Freud (Freud 1922), which seeks to explain sexual jealousy psychoanalytically.The explanation of professional desire (as that of the lawyer) with a model pivoting on sexual desire might be problematic.However, beyond Freud (and Kennedy's use of him), a rich literature and practice on projective identification opens up, with the work of the British psychoanalysts Marjorie Brierley, of Melanie Klein and of Herbert Rosenfeld untethering the concept from sexual jealousy.In current psychoanalytic discourse, it is traded as a universal explanatory model, which makes Kennedy's use for a psychoanalytic of the legal profession plausible (Figlio 2014).case, we need to clear our mind about the organisational and technological changes brought to the work of lawyers with the advent of legal tech.

The Impact of Legal Tech on the Organisation and Practice of Legal Services
An overview of the legal tech market reveals a huge gap between the promised automated future of the legal profession and the technological solutions available in the field today.This is best captured in an article by Webley et al. (2019) where the authors categorise existing analytical accounts of technological impact on the legal profession into three archetypal 'narratives' of augmentation, disruption and end (death) of the legal profession.Accordingly, Some of these 'narratives' may very well be stories told to maintain or highlight the public relevance of the profession by insisting on the essential usefulness of its professional knowledge and expertise for the future of society (Webley et al. 2019, p. 11).For Webley et al., writing in 2019, it is still far too early to assess the impact of legal tech on the profession.After all, the uptake of technology in the field is in no way in full swing, nor will such adaptation of the profession to technology be a harmonious process.Webley and her coauthors (2019, pp. 16-20) argue that the legal profession is a complex, contextual and socially uneven field, where attempts to predict a generalised impact of technology on the professional market can be misleading, inaccurate or risk undermining the active role of professionals in confronting the technological takeover.When looking closely at what is currently framed as game-changing, legal tech often appears as a loosely differentiated bundle of technological solutions, some of which, such as highspeed communication technologies and file sharing, do not reflect the imaginaries of an AI-enhanced automated robot lawyers one may have.
Mindful of such cautionary tales, one cannot but notice that legal tech, like other tech enterprises, continues to grow through the speculations of the tech market. 4In the UK, regulatory compliance and legal document management attracted most of the total funding into legal tech (Frontier Economics 2021).The attraction of capital has already mobilised a host of scholars and practitioners to speculate on the future of the legal practice, professional market and the ways in which law firms need to adapt in order to maintain profit margins and market share.With Webley et al. offering us the choice between augmentation, disruption and the death of the legal profession, the projected direction of legal tech developments ends up falling into the disruption genre. 5his impending tech takeover is projected to create disruption to a considerable extent at the lower strata of the legal profession, automating the lower-tier tasks such as search, draft, review and support.The critical consideration here of course regards the function that some of these automatable routines have for envisioning the legal pathways towards the production of legal answers.To this end then it becomes important to know whether the organisational changes of law firms at the bottom of the legal profession is in fact a novel effect of legal tech?So, to say what are those readily automatable tasks and would automation impact the organisation of the legal profession in manners novel enough that would impact the ideological underpinnings of the production of legal answers?
The existing scholarship traces the impact of legal tech at both individual and operational level.On an individual level, junior legal staff are set to be replaced by non-legal professionals such as project managers, tech developers and IT specialists (Veith et al. 2016). 6This leaves us with a picture of a fragmented professional practice which is no longer the monopolised province of jurists but one that is opened toward non-legal professionals and private tech companies.Similarly, and on an operational level, the existing projections hint towards an increased stratification and proletarianisation of the profession; larger law firms move steadily to leverage digital and communication technology in order to increase profit, by automating tasks traditionally done by entry level layers.Caserta (2020) projects that this will entail a gradual shift from a lockstep model to a model of law firms as corporations with stakeholder limited liability and a board of professional business directors who manages and determines the future direction of the profession.This is no mere proposition any longer: by December 2021, only two of the major U.S. law firms still adhered to the so-called lockstep payment model, with egalitarian remuneration according to seniority (Strom 2021).The rest had by then abandoned lockstep for models that differentiated according to each lawyer's individual contribution to profit.
This internal reorganisation of law firms 'from above' along the criterion of individual profitability and fragmentation of the profession at the bottom of the legal profession indicates a possible side-lining if not removal of lawyers' role at those making, contract: automated creation, contract: analytics/drafting/review, compliance support, legal expert systems, legislation: drafting, legislation: execution, litigation: representation, litigation analytics, litigation: drafting, litigation: prediction of judgement, search: case law and search: legislation.In their conceptual approach, COHUBICOL contends that the ongoing integration of legal tech into the mainstream legal practice 'could transform the nature of legal protection and notably of the Rule of Law.' see L. Diver, P. McBride, M. Medvedeva, A. Banerjee, E. D'hondt, T. Duarte, D. Dushi, G. Gori, E. van den Hoven, P. Meessen, M. Hildebrandt, 'Typology of Legal Technologies' (COHUBICOL, 2022), available at https:// publications.cohubicol.com/typology.COHUBICOL provided this typology for the specific objective of their research project.That is, among others, to demonstrate the potential impact of technology on 'legal effect'.COHUBICOL understands 'legal effect' as consequence of legally relevant facts and consequences of positive law upon legal status of legal subject in terms of changes in legal power, rights or obligations. 6In terms of the transformation of the outlook of the profession, it is projected that 30-50% of tasks that are performed by junior lawyers today, will be carried out by legal tech.Christian Veith et al., 'How Legal Technology Will Change the Business of Law', The Boston Consulting Group and Bucerius Law School, 2016.Gartner anticipates replacement of nearly 20% of generalist lawyers with non-lawyer staff (such as project managers, IT specialists, tech developers) by 2024.Within the same time frame, around half of the legal work related to major corporate transactions will be automated and a quarter of corporate sendings will be on non-specialist tech providers.See Rob van der Meulen 2022.early steps of defining the pathways to a right answer.Can it be the case that legal tech causes an organisational and individual transformation to the extent that it closes the door on the possibility of smuggling one's ideological orientation early on during development of pathways?The answer is: not likely.What we need to acknowledge here is that the legal tech is not the main driver here, but rather a meso-level phenomenon, driven in turn by an overarching transformation of the economic organisation of the legal profession from family businesses to the bureaucratic professional practices of the 20th century (See Flood 2012; Caserta and Madsen 2019).Flood (2012) usefully associates the above-mentioned stratification and deprofessionalisation of legal practice with the difficulty of acquiring credits and creative means of financing after the financial crisis of 2008 as well as the practical difficulties of strategic decision-making with an overgrowing body of partners with voting rights.Legal tech exacerbates these existing market dynamics that have already been in place and conditioned the profession.The overall characteristic of these practical and organisational changes remains similar: lawyers are gradually dislocated from their pre-platform bureaucracy resulting in fragmentation of lawyers' individual impact into layers of organisational structure, which consequently masks lawyers' role in generating conditions of arriving at the right legal answer under a new layer of projection -this time perhaps upon the adversaries' technological choices.
An overview of the existing legal tech and their associated narratives of change hints to an increasing automation of the bottom segment of the legal practice.To a considerable degree legal tech is projected to affect the execution of tasks that are already performed in a routinised fashion by non-lawyer staff, generalist lawyers, trainees, junior lawyers in law firms or else outsourced altogether.Bryters' careful claim of liberation appears significant for the strange place it occupies between the historical processes of outsourcing and the future promises of stratification of the profession by the digital turn.Bryter, as a no-code system, claims to leave the door open, at least discursively, for the occasional entrance of the ideological temptation, in order to determine what parts and segments of their tasks are automatable and decide how to execute that automation.

From Expert Systems to No-Code Systems
Expert systems are a class of artificial intelligence that solve complex problems by reasoning through, in our case, legal knowledge represented in the form of if-then rules, rather than through procedural code.An advantage of such systems is that they break down the relevant legal information into its constitutive parts in what is purported to be an open, intuitive, and easily understood way.
Expert systems have been around for at least half a century.Work in the Soviet Union on 'cybernetic systems' capable of replacing the creative lawyer was reported already back in 1963 (See Kerimov 1963).The Dendral project at Stanford was initiated in 1965, and the most widely known systems are those performing medical diagnoses (Feigenbaum and Buchanan 1993).Later, Buchanan and Headrick (1970) considered the possibility of using AI techniques to assist in legal reasoning in an influential paper.Writing in 1986, Richard Susskind reported on several candidates for expert systems in law and offered the following characteristics of them: they are computer programs that have been written with the aid of legal experts in particular, and usually highly specialised, areas of law … These expert systems are designed to function as intelligent assistants in the process of legal problem solving (and can also be used as teaching aids).The users of such systems are intended to be general legal practitioners, who, when faced with legal problems beyond their range of experience and knowledge, rather than always having to turn to appropriately qualified legal specialists, may instead consult their expert systems in law.Such systems as questions of their users and guide them through the problem-solving process, utilizing the embodied heuristic and formal knowledge of the experts who assisted in their design.Moreover, these systems offer explanations for their lines of reasoning and may be required to provide authority for all assertions made and conclusions drawn (p.175).
The primary reference point at this moment in time was computerised legal information retrieval systems such as LEXIS, which plainly functioned as a big database where users found court cases and other legal sources.As Susskind emphasises, there is an important difference between database systems such as LEXIS and knowledgebased expert systems.In the database, formal legal sources are stored in the computer memory in computer-readable format and retrieved, on request, by the user.This does not include any form of interpretation but simply feeding into the computer the raw material of the process of legal reasoning.In knowledge-based systems, sources must be represented, that is restructured so that they can be stored in the memory and utilised in the reasoning process.
The activity of legal knowledge representation, therefore, involves the operation of interpretative processes whereby the legal data of part of a legal system, valid at one particular point in time (that is, the legal data of a momentary legal system) is scrutinised, analysed and eventually reformulated in a fashion that is both faithful in meaning to the original source materials and that allows for the requisite transparency and flexibility of expert systems in law (Susskind 1986, p. 185).
In other words, knowledge-based systems involve a process of packaging the specific imaginative qualities of lawyers into a recurrently retrievable block in a larger system.
When we 'describe' the law in a computer programme, Susskind (p.187) goes on to say, we engage in a 'reformulation' or, following Golding, in a 'rational reconstruction' of an area of law.Arguably, this moves expert systems to the core of the lawyer-client relationship.Reading Susskind's 1986 explanations, we understand that this relationship was in the queue for radical change already back then; a change that took place once better computing and more money became available.Now, with the advent of technological and financial power, and the concomitant pressures on the legal services market, we are seeing this reconfiguration unfold.
What happens as the incarnated expertise of the elite lawyer is fed into an expert system and then moved out and scattered across its user base, to inform a generalist lawyer at the lower end of the food chain?The personal viewpoint needed to 'interrogate sceptically claims of legal necessity made to justify decision of a legal issue involving significant ideological stakes' (Kennedy 2014, p. 124) would seem to disintegrate with that sort of meta-personal distribution, with a novel practice taking its place.Where the rational reconstruction of law is borne out by a dispersed, multi-layered and multi-business form of agency, then what happens to the projective identification of legal answers provided by the adversary as ideologically motivated and hence wrong?If Kennedy's projective identification is at the core of lawyer's work, would not expert systems threaten this core?We argue that it does, because projective identification cannot be distributed across a system and its multiple actors: the expert lawyer who feeds the system is not present in the situation where her or his expertise is used by a generalist crafting an argument with its help in a concrete case.This alone is enough to disrupt projective imagination, and, with it, the legal imagination going into it.As the source of legalism is the external expert, it is impossible for the generalist user to claim legalism for her-or himself.The top-down distribution of legal positions fits badly with the unity of the lawyer subject that projective identification requires for the crafting and stabilising of imaginative solutions.
Would this be different with contemporary no-code systems, claiming to preserve the autonomy of the professional lawyer, while liberating her creativity from tasks that can be automatised?This appears to make them into a flatter alternative than the top-down model of the expert system.Susskind observed that expert systems redistribute expertise in novel ways; we argue that no-code systems do that as well.Yet they do more than that.
Bryter is a no-code system and will serve as our example.It was founded by lawyers, and the legal sector provides an important clientele for it (Bryter also targets customers in procurement and compliance).The way Bryter markets itself is by foregrounding the imaginative impact and expertise of the lawyer, and by casting service automation as the preferred mode to play out this expertise when competing with others in the legal services market.The critical point with Bryter is that it is not a ready-made product that competitor law firms could also acquire (as one might do with an expert system).Bryter emphasises that the lawyer does not have to learn to code.Neither will she be in the hands of developers to whom her intentions need to be translated.Rather, Bryter's marketing suggests that she would be translating her own cutting-edge competence into a number of client-facing digital products that are easy to access, yet individual enough to compete with that cutting edge on the market.Overall, Bryter's message is that the lawyer should use her expertise to think about the productification of her expertise with the help of the company's no-code platform.Bryter is seductive in that it seems to affirm forms of lawyering that precede legal tech.Bryter aims, even if only discursively, to separate itself from the pack by evoking and foregrounding the dependency of the right legal answer upon the imaginative path development carried out by a lawyer.But to foreground the lawyer, Bryter needs to offer space to the lawyer's strategy to stabilise the right legal answer by projective identification.Does it accomplish that?
The business model of Bryter relies on its ability to create client dependency on a platform that the client perceives to be less risky or demanding than its alternatives (such as missing the digitalisation of the law sector, learning to code, intensifying interaction with programmers).To appear as convincing, Bryter needs to be standardised to a point (hence the modular form of the flowchart environment has to appear really simple), but not too standardised, as this would leave no imaginative space where the client's individual creativity may be expressed -the very creativity ensuring the production of the right legal answer.When a law firm client buys into Bryter's arguments, it sees itself excelling exactly on individual creativity, as it transforms its expertise into modular flowcharts.7With creativity, however, comes the risk of ideological contamination.This risk, we learned from Kennedy, can be psychoanalytically dealt with by claiming the legalist elements of legal work for oneself while projecting its ideological elements onto an outsider.
The formalism of flowchart logic appears to resonate with the legalist aspect of legal argument production as alluded to by Kennedy. Kennedy (2014, p. 131) uses the term 'legalism' in a fairly non-technical way, including in its remit a broad array of practices with formalist properties, stretching from 'literalism, precedent, induction/ deduction, teleology or balancing' to the 'juriste garcon de cafe´' (jurist as cafe´ waiter), by analogy to Sartre's idea that the French café waiter of his time was engaged in a theatrical presentation of himself as a mechanical function of his duties.The Sartrean waiter denies his freedom even to himself, his waiterly discretion, when he chooses to ignore you or splash coffee when banging the cup down on your table (pp. 133-4).
Analogously, a lawyer productifying her knowledge with Bryter's flowchart logic denies to herself the freedom provided by the ideological element of argument production and reduces her own creativity to its theatrical representation in flowchart form.Bryter not only harbours the legalist element in projective identification, but even amplifies it.It does so by adding a further technological expression to the representation of formalist self-restraint and stringency characteristic for legalism.
To claim legalism for oneself is but one leg of Kennedy's projective identification.The use of Bryter might also permit, or even reinforce, the externalisation of the ideological element of legal argumentation.Any reinforcement of the first legalist leg of projective identification would reinforce its totality, including the projection of the ideological element onto the opponent.As the lawyer using Bryter has pressed her creativity into the logical straitjacket of the flowchart, the work of the opponent not using Bryter is more easily imagined as understructured, illogical and ideologically driven.This resonates well with Kennedy's projective identification.In all, Brytersomewhat counterintuitively -reinforces the traditional production of the right legal answer.To the extent other no-code platforms build on analogous formalisations as the one we analysed in Bryter, they do so, too.

Conclusions
At first sight, legal tech seems to threaten the traditional production of the right legal answer at least in part.Its logic is the dismemberment and reassembly of legal work and the legal market, where the lawyers are dislocated from the centre and lawyering is disintegrated into a modular practice performed across time and place.It shifts focus from the competent lawyer of flesh and blood to the stream of data that flows through the capillaries of modules and apps, identifying the latter as critical sites for profit making.It is unsurprising that legal tech is marketed with promises of liberating time for what would seem to be old-school and high-value legal work, because the processes of legal tech appear as incompatible with those by which the lawyer produces the right legal answer.
We have shown that reality is more complex.First, the organisational impact of legal tech merely exacerbates and accelerates an already ongoing and wider process of de-professionalisation, fragmentation and stratification of the profession.Within the course of that process, the lawyer is gradually removed from the centre of the preplatform bureaucratic legal practice.Legal tech represents a meso level in this wider process of economic reorganisation and can only be blamed in part for it.
The ideological element of lawyers' work will be challenging to track, buried as they are under additional layers of technologically complicated and structured pathways for legal argument.We show that expert systems are going too far in complicating matters, as they distribute the finding of the right legal answer across multiple lawyer subjects, with a heavy top-down relationship that does not enable all involved lawyers to fully identify with the projection of formalism onto themselves.This is perhaps an argument as strong as any that expert systems are on a dinosaur track and cannot be reconciled with the core of lawyering.
However, we suggest, ever more complicated layers of technology do not necessarily mean that lawyers are denied the ability to use their imagination to produce the right legal answer in the way outlined by Kennedy.As we have shown with the example of Bryter, it is entirely possible to perform projective identification within certain legal tech platforms.In fact, Bryter separates itself from the pack of competitors by ascribing the lawyer a novel centrality in technological reorganisation, imbuing the outcomes through Bryter's use with the legitimacy of the profession uniquely capable of producing the right legal answer.What is more, this not only opens the door for the lawyer to perform projective identification by using the Bryter platform, it rather adds further stability to it, and to the legal answers it enables.Platforms such as Bryter invite the lawyer to reinforce the formalisation of the legalist side of producing the right legal answer by translating it into the rigidity of the flowchart logic of the platform.This reinforcement of legalism comes with a reinforcement of projecting ideology onto the opposing lawyer and her legal answer.By combining the centrality of the lawyer with this reinforcement of projective identification, lawyer's imagination critical for the production of the right legal answer is preserved.The message of Bryter's marketing might be reduced to a slogan: Have the lawyer, but evict her ideological temptations more efficiently than before!