Leading a Grassroots Revolution
Milan has spent the last three years setting about revolutionising and disrupting the legal system and the way jurisprudence is administered in Australia.
As co-founder and national director of the Legal Forecast, Gandhi has the privilege of overseeing a rapidly growing community of talented, passionate early-career professionals and law students. Milan is also a final year law student at the University of Queensland and a research clerk at McCullough Robertson Lawyers.
“More than merely forecasting the legal profession, we at The Legal Forecast have a desire to influence its future to ensure it is the best possible future, not just for lawyers but for society as a whole.”
Before law school, Gandhi was working as a corporate and music video director and writing screenplays.
“While the comparatively superficial world of entertainment does not - and probably should not - translate to the legal world, I eventually realised there was a massive, untapped opportunity to question the way the legal profession operates and to think creatively about how the law connects with and serves everyday people.”
His inspiration came in 2014 when he read 'Tomorrow's Lawyers’ by Richard Susskind.
“The tagline of the book is ‘an introduction to your future’, and is essentially written for early-career professionals and explains to them that the future of legal practice will be a world of internet-based global businesses, online document production, commoditised service, legal process outsourcing, and web-based simulation practice.
“I found the themes of the book to be profoundly absent in what was being taught by Australian law schools and, to be fair to law schools, I found it odd that law students themselves were not driving a conversation about the future of their profession.
“This was particularly bizarre given that many of the changes forecasted by Susskind are likely to disrupt the utility of our rather expensive degrees.”
Immediately, the idea of The Legal Forecast was born and with the support and passion of several co-founders, they turned the idea into a reality.
“Of course, what I did not know in the beginning, which I am very happy to know now, is that there was a massive tribe of law students, early-career professionals, and academics, all over the country, who shared my mix of apprehension and excitement for the future of law,” Gandhi says.
The Legal Forecast has a thriving Queensland, NSW and Victorian presence and is kick-starting initiatives in the Australian Capital Territory.
The body is not-for-profit, its staff volunteer their time, and their goal is simple: advance legal practice through technology and innovation.
“Our initiatives often feature a focus on access to justice and improving the mental wellbeing of lawyers themselves.”
In 2016, with a group of bright start-up-obsessed students called QUT Starters, the Legal Forecast ran a massive legal start-up competition or ‘hackathon’ called Disrupting Law.
“Our competition invited students from different disciplines to spend 54 hours thinking of a way to disrupt law.
“Each team was paired with a law firm and pitched to an amazing panel which comprised a legal tech guru, an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, the CEO of the law society, and a professional ethics solicitor.”
Two teams including the winner of Disrupting Law 2016 are now fully functional start-ups.
“We are super proud of this outcome and expect similar results in 2017,” he says.
Disrupting Law 2017 will be bigger and better than ever and takes place from 4 to 6 August in Brisbane.
He says the Legal Forecast’s goal is to run Disrupting Law in every state and territory and work towards a legal innovation Olympics-style national final.
Beyond their hackathons The Legal Forecast runs panel events with “truly interesting speakers”, a pro bono think tank called TLF Brainstorm, and launched several new initiatives this year including a mental health forum and a legal innovation podcast.
“We’ve also kick-started a blog with Survive Law called ‘Innovation Popcorn’, which we use to demystify legal innovation hot topics for a law student audience.
“We always want to remain not-for-profit, ahead of the curve, and run by early-career professionals and students for early-career professionals and students.”
Gandhi is excited to be part of the College of Law’s Centre for Legal Innovation and the prospect of working with its Advisory Board members.
"Thank you to the Centre for Legal Innovation for recognising The Legal Forecast and appointing me to the Centre’s Advisory Board. On behalf of our legal innovation tribe, I am keen to remain well informed, creative and fearless in contributing the occasional crazy idea, and hope I can make a positive difference to the important work of the Centre."
Gandhi says one of the biggest opportunities arising from legal innovation is that the menial and tedious side of legal work, particularly for juniors, will decrease over time and enable a refocus on people and creative problem solving.
“More importantly, legal innovation can be harnessed to bridge the divide between everyday people and their own legal system, a divide that, in part, exists because of prohibitive legal costs and the tragic lack of funding flowing to community legal centres,” he says.
“While it may not solve the dilemma outright, I hope that legal innovation and, again, particularly technological innovation, can enhance access to justice.”
He points to a legal chat-bot in the UK that initially helped overturn 50,000 parking fines and which is now assisting refugees to claim asylum.
“It is hard for me to articulate the biggest threat to the profession – this is because what some practitioners may see as a threat, others will see as an opportunity.”
He says while it may take time and effort to learn about new things, learning them will likely save you time and effort down the track.
“In a profession still unfortunately dominated by time-billing, saving time is super important - particularly to clients.”
He says he is optimistic about the future of the legal profession.
“I see the emerging swell of legal tech start-ups, particularly in legal analytics - see Australia's own Jurimetrics. As for Aussie and New Zealand legal tech start-ups generally, see LawHawk, LawAdvisor, Xakia Technologies, Contact Monitor and many others. These are powerful and creative ventures that shine a light on inefficient and outdated practices,” he says.
“The key theme is already, therefore, a push from the grassroots level - courageous entrepreneurs, some even undergraduates and some with no legal background whatsoever, forcing positive change from the bottom up.
“To their credit, some large commercial law firms are already jumping into the fray to safeguard their competitiveness by adopting or mimicking all manner of innovative initiatives.”
“An example is the initiative driven by Petra Stirling and TLF's own Adrian Agius at Gilbert + Tobin to pioneer the ‘technolegal’ role for code-literate paralegals and lawyers. Plus, look at the lawyers - junior and senior - from 14 different law firms who give up a weekend to support students they’ve never met before at Disrupting Law,” he says.
“I also believe legal education will undergo a transformation. We are already seeing this and it has been independent, student-run initiatives like Disrupting Law and HackJustice which have powerfully set the pace.”