Name: Artem Afyan
Position: Co-founder and managing partner at Juscutum
Key Point: The legal profession needs to use technology to make itself more ‘user-friendly’
When Artem Afyan was in seventh grade, he already knew he wanted to be a lawyer. He’d had a brief flirtation with becoming a game developer, but that soon passed. The law was his calling.
Fast forward two decades, and the 32-year-old has found a way to combine the two professions. Juscutum, the law firm he co-founded at the age of 24 and where he is a managing partner, is in the process of developing a computer game that teaches players how to react if their homes or offices are searched by police.
The game is more than just a chance to have some fun. It addresses a serious problem today in Ukraine: Abuse of power by law enforcement agencies.
“It’s one of our leading practices,” he told the Kyiv Post. “We focus on protecting businesses from the government and from police harassment.”
Corrupt schemes
A typical scenario involves authorities groundlessly confiscating a firm’s computers and then demanding payment in exchange for their return. Juscutum has defended clients who have come up against this problem and is working pro bono with the government to draft legislation that would make it harder for police to carry out such corrupt schemes. Afyan believes such work is an essential part of being a lawyer.
“We’re trying to do our best to make society better,” he stated. “That’s what I think this profession is about. You can’t get very rich as a lawyer. The only reason to work in this field is because you have a chance to change the surrounding nation.”
Afyan has seen how graft inside the Ukrainian justice system has damaged the image of lawyers. He says legal professionals are sometimes disparagingly referred to as “luggage carriers” because of the belief that their main function is to offer bribes to judges on behalf of clients.
“This system is somehow alive and that means that some lawyers are involved,” he said. “I don’t know the numbers, but it doesn’t matter how many, because a corrupted part corrupts the whole system.”
Using technology
Afyan hopes his firm can improve lawyers’ standing in society. Chiefly, it is trying to do this by making greater use of technology. This includes the development of a smartphone app, already now available for download, which functions like a hotline. At the tap of a button the app sends a signal to Juscutum with the user’s location, and a lawyer is dispatched to provide assistance.
Afyan says he didn’t set out to be so heavily involved in technology at the start, but it turned out to be the best way to affect change.
“We came to this not because we specifically wanted to be involved in ‘legal tech’ but because we told ourselves that we won’t give bribes, we won’t steal from the state budget, and we won’t take part in corporate raiding,” he told the Kiyv Post. “We just wanted to find our own way to develop our business and change the market. Technology seemed to be the only way left to be competitive.”
Juscutum’s involvement with the digital sphere is not limited to in-house innovations. It also provides legal services to the IT sector. Past cases it has advised on include that of a developer who wanted to release a smartphone app about growing cannabis on the U.S. market.
Teenagers play with their smartphones on Kyiv’s Independence Square. According to Artem Afyan, a managing partner at law firm Juscutum, the legal profession needs to become more “user-friendly” through technology. Juscutum has developed and released its own smartphone app which allows users to summon a lawyer to their location at the touch of a button. (Volodymyr Petrov)
The firm has also worked with governments to help them understand the benefits of blockchain, the platform behind Bitcoin. In 2013, Juscutum became the first legal practice in Ukraine to accept the digital currency as payment.
“All these IT issues will soon cover the whole of society and you won’t even notice,” Afyan said. “It’s already hard to remember the moment when smartphones became an ordinary thing. The same thing should happen with these technologies. Blockchain, for example, can solve lots of problems. Maybe it will bring new ones, but we’ll solve them.”
Lawyers in space?
Engagement with technology is only one aspect of a grander plan. He hopes lawyers – at least the ones at his firm – will come to be thought of not just as consultants but as “social engineers” who “advise you on how you should establish your relationships in society.”
The 32-year-old says the motivation behind the vision came when he heard SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk announce plans to build shuttles that could take hundreds of people to Mars sometime around 2030. He realized then that if the legal profession fails to cultivate a wider appeal now, it is at risk of becoming obsolete.
“We understand that there will be no place for lawyers on space flights,” said Afyan. “Nobody will want to take a lawyer with them. That’s why we feel this profession needs to change.”
