LeXpunK

Gabriel Shapiro
3 min readMay 13, 2020

THE NEW LEGAL PRAXIS

LeXpunK is law unchained from expectations — a disruptive new attorney praxis designed to grab lawyers by their neckties and drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

We believe:

  • law is a public good and should be open to all
  • law is dynamic and the practice of law is creative
  • private law is as important as public law; the deal table as important as the courtroom
  • the “law firm” is not the atomic unit of law practice, the lawyer is — and lawyers are inherently autonomous
  • the role of lawyer as civil servant does not kick in after hours, but should permeate a lawyer’s practice and lead lawyers to seek rational, value-maximizing outcomes at all times
  • lawyer/client is a dead dichotomy; lawyers should partner with clients in multidimensional relationships, not merely “serve” them
  • effective lawyering is viral and must not be quarantined inside archaic state boundaries
  • lawyers are incentive programmers; the wisdom of game theory, economics, agile software development and peer-to-peer technologies can enhance legal engineering to yield massive breakthroughs in social scaling
  • lawyers must not be monopolists or protectionists — delivering access to justice requires finding a place for all who’d like to practice law
  • lawyers must not be priests, elitists or fascists
  • lawyers must not be racketeers, creating artificial problems only they can solve just to stay relevant
  • lawyers should be mavericks, not mercenaries
  • good legal-tech makes lawyers cybernetic; bad legal-tech makes robots lawyerly
  • golf is not a lawyering skill; suits and ties are optional

We fight:

  • to always be hacking on the legal commons, creating free open-source frameworks and libraries, legal protocols, and shared standards
  • for the right to act as legal blade runners — client-less, idealistic, fighting for justice on our own terms
  • to let non-lawyers own and participate as equals in law firms
  • to decentralize “The Bar” with new autonomous bar associations
  • to shard lawyerdom, creating dynamic and relevant new guilds, each with its own rules
  • to redesign lawyer ethics for a new world of porous firm boundaries and inspired cross-firm collaborations
  • to get lawyers paid for creative new work in creative new ways
  • to encourage clients to engage in robust self-governance, using private law to opt out of state-imposed defaults
  • for bar associations, model law committees and major conferences to open themselves to all lawyers and open-source their materials
  • to shred the veil of PACER and Westlaw and Lexis put courts and law journals and statutes free and online for all
  • to demystify law for the public with quality education and powerful tools

We assemble:

If you’re a LeXpunK, add “LeXpunK” to your bio, resume, interests, tattoo collection…. rep #LeXpunK on social media…push for the revolution…tell your friends, colleagues, partners, bosses, lovers, professors, dogs...immanentize the eschaton… autonomize the Zone…BE the lawyer that a better future needs…

Telegram: tg://join?invite=ERKAkFBOZOOjf1fcwTXJ8g

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