Justice is more than words on a page—it’s also what we see, design, and interact with. In this conversation, Jack and visual culture expert Sarah Lewis dive into how imagery, design, and technology profoundly influence how law is understood, practiced, and experienced. They explore how the legal profession can develop a new kind of literacy: one that recognizes the power of visuals and digital tools to shape narratives, promote fairness, and challenge bias. Listen now.
Featuring:
Jack Newton CEO & Founder of Clio
Jack Newton is the pioneer of legal technology and the author of The Client-Centered Law Firm. He has spent decades helping lawyers build more efficient, productive, and client-centric practices.
Sarah Lewis Associate Professor at Harvard University and Founder of Vision & Justice
Harvard professor, MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow, and founder of the Vision & Justice project, Sarah Lewis bridges law, art, and social change in groundbreaking ways. As a best-selling author (The Rise), she reframes justice through cultural history and visual representation, expanding how we understand equity in America.
Conversation Summary:
In this conversation, Harvard professor and best-selling author Sarah Lewis reveals how visual narratives, ranging from courtroom photography to AI-generated imagery, hold the power to either uphold systemic bias or dismantle it. The conversation moves beyond the surface of courtroom aesthetics and virtual backdrops to examine how legal technologies can either reinforce systemic inequalities or become tools for greater inclusion. From the evolving role of AI in justice to reimagining legal education, this discussion offers a thoughtful exploration of how seeing differently can lead to justice done differently.
In this conversation, we explore:
- The gift of failure: How the legal profession can move past risk-aversion to embrace “near wins” as fuel for justice.
- Narrative as evidence: Why historical civil rights victories like Brown v. Board of Education relied as much on photographers as they did on lawyers.
- The ethics of AI imagery: The dangers of historical bias in machine learning and how tech companies can design for “representational excellence.”
Transcript
Read full transcript
[01:00:03] Chapter 1: Introductions
Jack Newton: Sarah, it’s great to have you here. We’re in New York City, where you’ve spent so much of your life—from your time at MoMA to your current role at Harvard. I’d love for you to talk about what makes New York so special, not just as a hub for culture, but as a center point for the pursuit of justice.
Sarah Lewis: I love being a New Yorker. Growing up near the United Nations, I had to contend with what was happening in the world just to get to school. It was a unique community that constantly reminded me of global events. I became fascinated by how the arts and narrative define “who counts and who belongs,” and how those narratives inform the work of law.
[01:03:36] Chapter 2: The origins of Vision & Justice Project
Jack Newton: Tell me about the origin story of the Vision & Justice Project. Was there a specific moment that sparked this vision?
Sarah Lewis: It traces back to 1926. My grandfather asked his 11th-grade history teacher in Brooklyn why their textbooks didn’t reflect the world around them. The teacher told him that Black Americans had done nothing to merit inclusion. When he refused to accept that answer, he was expelled for “impertinence.” He became a jazz musician instead, but that question—about the power of representation—animated my life and led to this project.
[01:05:05] Chapter 3: Mastery and the “Near win”
Jack Newton: In your book The Rise, you talk about the “gift of failure” and the “near win.” How does the density and energy of New York capture those ideas?
Sarah Lewis: New York is full of people grasping for dreams. Mastery is about working toward a dream over decades or generations. I realized that propulsion often comes from coming just shy of your goal—the “near win.” It provides the fuel to reach the dream.
Jack Newton: Law is a very risk-averse profession where failure has dire consequences. How can lawyers better embrace the concept of the near win?
Sarah Lewis: Every court case is a success for one and a near win for another. Research shows that when we come shy of a goal, we become more granular and focused. In law, justice is often an aggregation of near wins correcting themselves over time.
[01:08:52] Chapter 4: The marriage of narrative and law
Sarah Lewis: We are finally understanding the marriage between narrative work and law. Whether it’s Bryan Stevenson using a memorial to transform the imagination regarding racial terror, or Lee Gelernt using photographs in childhood separation cases, narrative transforms perception in ways law alone cannot.I first understood this through Gordon Parks’s photographs of the Kenneth Clark “doll test.” Those images showed the internal psychic state of injustice in a way that was necessary evidence for Brown v. Board of Education. It transformed Jim Crow “rule” back into the reality of inhumanity.
[01:14:19] Chapter 5: Creating spaces for innovation
Jack Newton: The technology world fails fast and iterates. The legal profession is precedent-based and slow. How do we build a culture of productive experimentation in law?
Sarah Lewis: We fail to see innovative solutions when we don’t afford ourselves “private embryonic space” to take risks. In group decisions, the pressure to conform is massive; the rate of giving a correct but dissenting answer drops to 25% when faced with group dissent. Organizations need a culture that supports privation—like Google’s “pet project” time that gave us Gmail. Lawyers need spaces outside the courtroom to reconsider the narratives we uphold.
[01:22:27] Chapter 6: Representational excellence in tech
Jack Newton: How does the concept of “representational excellence” apply to legal technology? How should companies like Clio measure success in equity and inclusion?
Sarah Lewis: We must marry the image of the entire world with how our technology fashions representation. A young marketer at Google took my course and realized the limits of AI in skin tone representation, leading to “Project Real Tone” for the Google Pixel. In the legal arena, incorrect image capture or biased machine learning can have fatal downstream consequences.
[01:24:44] Chapter 7: Mitigating bias in AI
Jack Newton: AI is often trained on historical data containing systemic bias. How do we ensure AI doesn’t amplify those biases?
Sarah Lewis: We must educate ourselves on why these histories of injustice are legible in our technology. Historically, photography was weaponized to denigrate certain lives; Kodak didn’t even shift its chemical emulsions to capture darker skin tones until furniture and chocolate companies complained. AI extends this story. We need to support technologists who are undoing how machine learning propagates these biased histories.
[01:31:04] Chapter 8: The “Black box” of AI and human oersuasion
Jack Newton: AI is often a “black box” where we can’t see the algorithm’s bias. How can we ensure transparency?
Sarah Lewis: While AI is opaque, we are no longer in a “shadowed secret state.” Public discourse is robust. We must challenge the machine-learning “universal ideal” and be honest about the marriage of image, narrative, and power.
Jack Newton: As AI takes over drafting and research, what is the uniquely human thing left for lawyers to do?
Sarah Lewis: The singular gift of the human mind is to consider what we don’t know we don’t know. AI can’t surface a hidden injustice like Dorothea Lange’s photography surfaced the reality of Japanese American internment camps. Only the human heart and spirit know what it takes to persuade another that a scenario is unjust.
[01:39:13] Chapter 9: Visual culture in law schools
Jack Newton: Should law schools make a course on visual culture mandatory?
Sarah Lewis: Yes. Lawmakers must understand how to use narrative to fashion arguments and recognize when law has failed because it ignored culture. If lawyers don’t understand the narrative force of visual culture, they are bereft of a tool they absolutely need.
Jack Newton: Sarah, this time has flown by. Thank you for joining me.
Sarah Lewis: Thank you so much for having me.
