Does the lawyer of tomorrow already exist?

For the first episode of Code to Code, the Silex podcast dedicated to the intersection of legal and machine language, Kyriaki Bongard hosts Marc Bonnant, former Bâtonnier of the Geneva Bar and named the world’s greatest living French-speaking orator in 2016. The conversation ranges from the essence of courtroom advocacy to the forces transforming it: why the legal profession has become more dense and technical, and what role eloquence still plays when clients expect answers that are as fast as they are accurate. Marc Bonnant then addresses artificial intelligence directly, discussing what a machine will never grasp about legal reasoning and what remains irreducibly human in the pursuit of justice.

A steady, lucid, and deeply thoughtful perspective from a practitioner who has witnessed the profession change from the inside and has reflected at length on what should never change.

I think that tomorrow, judges will be robots. I think the public prosecutor will be a robot, and the plaintiff as well. And ultimately, there will be only one human in the room. It will be the person—the one who will be convicted or, hypothetically, acquitted. And I believe the lawyer’s purpose is to stand beside that last human.
Marc Bonnant