Authoritative Knowledge In Turbulent Times: Digitality and the Future of Legal (Professional) Expertise

Legal professional expertise is a form of authoritative knowledge through which legal professions establish jurisdiction and exercise professional authority. The authority of that expertise depends on the social and institutional processes through which legal knowledge is produced, validated, and legitimised. Digitality refers to the socio-technical condition in which computational infrastructures and data-driven systems organise these processes by reshaping social relations, institutional practices, and the production of meaning. This session explores how digitality is transforming legal professional expertise and, in turn, reconfiguring the boundaries of professional jurisdiction. Drawing on Abbott's systems theory of professions alongside insights from legal consciousness and digital studies, the contributions to this session conceptualise legal professional expertise as a socially organised form of authoritative knowledge whose legitimacy depends on professional claims to jurisdiction over specialised legal work. This perspective provides a framework for analysing how digitality redistributes expert functions, embeds professional authority within socio-technical systems, and reshapes the institutional and social processes through which legal professional expertise is constituted, recognised, and contested. Contributors will examine how professional jurisdiction is renegotiated as legal knowledge becomes digitally mediated; how relationships between legal professionals, technologies, and publics reshape the legitimacy and authority of legal professional expertise; and what these developments reveal about the governance of law under conditions of digital transformation. In considering digitality as a constitutive feature of contemporary legal practice that reshapes professional authority and jurisdiction, this session advances a sociological understanding of how legal professional expertise, authoritative knowledge, and professional jurisdiction are being reconfigured in turbulent times.