This year the Serbian bar is getting an anthem and a commission on artificial intelligence. A book still in the making asks something else: how does a lawyer actually think? We followed the trail of that question.
On 13 June 2026, at the first regular session of the newly elected Assembly of the Bar Association of Serbia, delegates in Belgrade set up thirteen standing commissions. One of them has a name that ten years ago would have sounded like the title of a science-fiction story: the Commission for Digitalisation, Artificial Intelligence and New Technologies in the Legal Profession. At the same session, a public competition was announced for the lyrics and music of an anthem for the Serbian bar, with a first prize of 350,000 dinars.
Two months earlier, in April, the disciplinary prosecutor of the same association sent colleagues a warning that quickly made the rounds of law offices. Sensationalist appearances, self-praise and legal advice given to strangers on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Facebook may breach the Code of Professional Ethics for Lawyers. A lawyer, he reminded them, may not publicly praise their own knowledge and abilities. What should recommend them is expertise, reputation and trust earned through work.
An anthem, artificial intelligence, social media. Three headlines from a single year describe a profession changing faster than it can describe itself. Into that gap steps a book that has neither a publisher nor a release date yet, but already has a question: the profession that defends others — who studies it?
The road to the bar card
To become a lawyer in Serbia, you need a law degree and a pass in the judicial exam. Since the Law on the Legal Profession of 2011 there has also been a bar exam before a commission of the Bar Association, introduced at the time as a complete novelty. At the end of the road comes the oath: the lawyer swears to perform their duties conscientiously, to respect the Constitution, the laws and the Code of Professional Ethics for Lawyers, and to protect the reputation of the profession. The law also provides for a Bar Academy, a body for the continuing training of lawyers and trainees.
Each of these steps tests knowledge: regulations, procedures, deadlines, ethical rules. None was designed to answer what comes afterwards, in the office, when a client sits down across the desk and starts talking. How does that story become a case? What does the lawyer hear, and what slips past them? When is it wise to change one’s mind? And how do they know they got it wrong?
The file is closed, the judgment remains. What happened in the lawyer’s head leaves with them.
Knowledge that walks out the door
Every case ends eventually. The file is bound, sent to the archive and given a number under which it can be found again if needed. The judgment remains. The law it relied on remains. The pleadings, minutes and deadlines remain, neatly stacked and stamped.
But something remains nowhere. Nobody knows why, in the third month, the lawyer abandoned the theory they had believed in from day one, which fact they overrated, or which question they never asked the client. Nobody knows how the same case would have looked in someone else’s hands. In medicine, diagnostic traps and decision-making under pressure have long been a field of their own. In law, experience is still mostly passed on by word of mouth: in a courthouse corridor, after a hearing, from a senior colleague to a junior one.
The study that opened the door a crack
In the summer and autumn of 2016, researcher Miljan Savić sent a questionnaire to 4,510 addresses of lawyers, law firms and law students. 325 people replied: 131 lawyers, 80 trainee lawyers and 114 students. They rated imagined situations from practice, from clearly unethical to clearly ethical. Four patterns emerged from the answers: procedural obstruction, exploitation, inappropriate treatment of clients, and attitudes towards trainees.
The paper was published in 2020 in the Annals of the Belgrade Law Faculty, with a sentence that is easy to miss: until then, no research in Serbia had taken professional ethics in the legal profession as its subject. The author was careful. The sample was one of convenience, the response rate low, and the conclusions should not be generalised. But that sentence alone says something about the profession. The bar is as old as law itself, and systematic research into how lawyers think about their own dilemmas has only just begun in Serbia.
What Advokatologija proposes
The manuscript by Prof. Srđan Aleksić, Advokatologija: The Lawyer Between Law, Truth and the Human Being, has seven parts and seventy chapters and ends with a manifesto and a synthesis. Its thesis is easy to state and hard to carry out: that legal work (thinking, proving, deciding, strategy, organisation, mistakes and responsibility) should be studied systematically, with a clear subject and method.
The book does not claim to have founded a recognised science. Nor does it claim to be the first to take professions seriously: the sociology of professions has done so for decades, and the term “advocatology” has already appeared in Russian and Ukrainian legal literature. Its ambition is to bring all of this into a single framework. That framework includes a theory of integrated legal practice, a general theory of the legal case, a nine-step method of case analysis, the evidence map, and chapters on cognitive errors and professional responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence.
We are not a new science. We are a proposal. And a proposal that fears criticism isn’t a proposal. It’s an advertisement.
Why it matters to people who aren’t lawyers
Anyone who has ever signed a power of attorney knows the feeling. You hand someone the hardest part of your life and hope they know what they are doing. You trust a professional whose work almost no one sees from the inside: not the client, not the public, often not even colleagues. That is why the question of how a lawyer decides is not merely a professional matter. It concerns everyone who has had to rely on someone else’s expert judgement.
For law students, it is a question their faculty rarely asks directly: how does a lawyer think when the law offers no ready answer? For trainee lawyers it offers a language for what they learn from their own mistakes; for experienced lawyers and those who run firms, the question of how a professional standard is passed on through a team and over the years. For professors and researchers it is a challenge: does this proposal have a subject, a method and testable hypotheses?
What comes next
In this special edition, Legal Smart will publish analyses of individual concepts from the book, conversations with the author, and answers from lawyers, professors and students to the same question. It will also publish pieces that argue against the book, provided they are well argued. The first file opens on Instagram, on the @advokatologija account: one dilemma a week, no answers in advance.
