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w w w . c a n a d i a n l a w y e r m a g . c o m M A Y 2 0 1 9 25 The next big research project for Hadfield was examining the World Trade Center bombing case. After terrorists had set off a bomb underneath the building, the families of victims sued the owner of the World Trade Center, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The bombing happened in 1993, but the case had still not gone to trial in the early 2000s. When the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks happened, the U.S. government acted quickly to avoid a similar scenario for the families of victims in that attack. Congress passed legislation that allowed the families to avoid protracted litigation and be compensated more quickly. Hadfield's research then morphed into a comparison of how families affected by both attacks experienced the justice system. While the World Trade Center bombing litigation did result in huge legal fees, Had- field found that the families of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks also lost something by avoid- ing an adversarial process. After speaking with many of these families, she concluded that there were three key elements the families felt they had given up: They were never given information about what went wrong, they were not given a public forum to acknowl- edge that there were wrongs done and they were not given the chance to participate in a process to help avoid a similar event from happening again. "If we look at our law and economics analysis, it says the value of your lawsuit is [the] size of the cheque you could get multiplied by the probability you'll get it. And, in fact, if you talk to a lot of lawyers and judges, they will say that's what the law is about. It's about getting a certain amount of money." Hadfield's research also examined how the legal system has failed the most sophisticated and wealthy clients. She began interviewing general counsel at some of the biggest companies — including Cisco, Apple and Google. As consumers of legal services, they had a similar feeling to the Sept. 11 families: The system didn't work. When Hadfield interviewed Kent Walker, the GC of Google, she was told that, during his career, he had only met a handful of lawyers who he would put in front of his board of directors. Jonathan Anschell, GC of CBS Television, told her that what his company needed was critical analysis and strategies for dealing with risks. "What they don't need are lawyers who limit themselves just to sounding the alarm when they sniff risk," Hadfield recounts Anschell telling her in her 2017 book Rules for a Flat World. Hadfield's law students at U of T are now benefitting from her critical approach in the new "Legal Design Lab" course she taught this year. The lab encourages students to work in teams and develop a proposal for an app, company or service that addresses a problem in our legal system. Hadfield's course approaches legal problems much differently than the traditional case law approach, where students read mostly appellate cases, which she says was invented in Harvard in the late 1800s. Under that meth- od, Hadfield says, "we were not really training people to be valuable and help people solve problems. We are train- ing them to be very smart about law. In the old world, the way elite legal educa- tion and markets worked, it was enough to say you [are training] people to be very smart. And then they went off to their law firms, and they learned, in fact, how to practise law. That worked fine [then]. It's not working fine now." Being back in Toronto has also allowed Hadfield to make connections with research- ers and organizations working on artificial intelligence, her current area of interest. Unlike traditional tort or commercial law, the regulation of AI is a "wild west" at the moment, she says, which means it may be able to avoid some of the problems of those other regimes if it is designed properly at the outset. And while regulating AI is no doubt a complex topic that has no easy solutions, Hadfield knows one simple thing about how it should work. It should be designed to solve the problems of those it affects and not for the ben- efit of those who have designed the system itself. "In the old world, the way elite legal education and markets worked, it was enough to say you [are training] people to be very smart. And then they went off to their law firms, and they learned, in fact, how to practise law. That worked fine [then]. It's not working fine now." When you are looking for specialized legal counsel, turn to the resource that showcases peer-ranked Canadian legal talent. lexpert.ca/directory LAWYER Untitled-3 1 2019-04-23 9:37 AM

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