Extract from Melina Efstathiou’s article, “Determinismus Leviosa”
In the first Charms lesson at Hogwarts, Ron Weasley waves his wand like a man fending off wasps, gets the incantation wrong and the feather stays exactly where it was. Hermione corrects his pronunciation and his wrist movement, then makes it rise. The spell was never the point. The technique was.
I think of that scene every time I hear “deterministic” used in legal technology. It has become our own Wingardium Leviosa, a word we say in the hope that something heavy will float. It appears in pitches, in procurement questionnaires, in expert reports and, if we are honest, in the way practitioners sometimes describe their own work. Like the spell, it only does anything when the person saying it understands what they are doing.
Two excuses, one cape
The word gets used in two opposite ways, and both avoid the question.
The first is “it is deterministic, so the result is objective.” You hear it in pitches and procurement answers and sometimes from practitioners describing their own work. It borrows the authority of arithmetic: Same input, same output, nothing subjective in between.
