
AI will cause “structural collapse” of law firms by 2030 - bootload
http://www.legalfutures.co.uk/latest-news/report-ai-will-transform-legal-world
======
morgante
I'm currently working on a startup which supplies automated legal document
analysis for the legal industry. [1] So I definitely see the power for AI for
transforming the legal industry, but also encourage caution in reading the
report.

One thing to note is that a huge amount of legal work done today is actually
quite possible to automate. It's a lot of reading through documents and
finding the few clauses that actually matter to a contract or document, then
focusing in on those. It's defining an overall strategy and then fleshing out
(mostly templated) documents to implement that strategy.

Another factor in favor of legal AI is that legal documents have much more
restricted grammar than standard English text, leading to less ambiguity. This
makes them both easier to parse and to create automatically (you don't need to
make the text sound "natural"). By 2030, AI will be able to easily summarize a
full legal document and provide relevant references. (In fact, probably much
sooner.)

That being said, it's important to note that this report isn't predicting the
disappearance of lawyers (nor am I). Instead, it's the collapse of traditional
law firms, which depend on a pyramid of partners doing high-level sales and
strategy work being supported by associates and paralegals doing the grunt
work. The grunt work is rapidly becoming automated, but I don't think AI will
ever replace the client interactions and recommendations component. We've seen
a lot of success with AI-lawyer pairing and I do think we'll see much more of
it in the future. This definitely challenges the organizational structure of
law firms. In the future, I think we'll see a lot more small and individual
practices where clients work with a partner they trust who can get a lot more
done thanks to AI doing all the grunt work.

[1] [https://docnavapp.com/](https://docnavapp.com/)

~~~
HillRat
Fascinating! I do wonder what happens to the traditional white-shoe partner
track, where associates make their bones do sixteen hour days of grunt work
(albeit with fantastic compensation) as a method of gaining experience and
reputation. The skills of a high-level attorney, regardless of the practice,
are honed through decades of experience. How would systemic AI affect the
development of the profession?

~~~
rms_returns
Don't worry, the AI isn't going the replace the "Perry Mason" kind of lawyers,
they are irreplaceable! AI is designed to replace the "Junior Grunt Joe" kind
of lawyer/associate who is mostly involved in documentation and assistance.

~~~
rodgerd
And where do the next generation of Perry Mason lawyers come from, if there
are no rungs on the bottom of the ladder?

~~~
rms_returns
Well, that logic applies to all fields, not just legal. Lower rungs are
disappearing from everywhere. In accountancy, junior accountants used to
manually do "debit-credit" first, now Excel does it for them, so what will
they learn?

In IT, junior programmers used to toil hard with algorithms and data-
structures to come up with barely working programs. Now there are IDEs,
libraries, frameworks, CMSs all built and ready for them, so what will they
learn?

In Physics and Math, Scientists worked hard on just the theoretical framework
first and scratch their heads in classrooms. Now there are computer software
that do it for them. Perhaps this explains we didn't get another
Newton/Einstein since last few decades?

------
thegasman
Lawyer here. I do not know how soon AI will achieve either the humanity or
know-how to replace lawyers, but will offer a few observations as a
practitioner.

As for the know-how: Processing and comprehending legal texts does not seem to
be an insurmountable technological task. However, the breadth of legal
practice areas (family law, IP, criminal law, administrative law, etc.), and
how these several areas often overlap to influence our daily lives seems a
much more complex task.

As for the human element: legal problems are frequently extremely personal and
require an empathetic response. This is so at the lawyer-client level, as well
as the lawyer-lawyer level. After all, most legal issues require navigating
complex relationships between humans, or groups of them. I don't think our
society is ready for automated justice at this point. My clients certainly
aren't.

So, it seems the human component isn't immediately threatened by AI, while the
technical know-how might benefit those with deeper pockets and access to the
"better" AI. Practically speaking though, the deep pocketed clients already
have armies of lawyers at their disposal. With that in mind, the technical
advances are likely to benefit smaller practitioners and clients (like me) who
have limited resources.

I fully expect to be practicing law in 2030. If all the lawyer jobs are fully
automated by then, I'll have MUCH more to worry about.

~~~
jessriedel
It's a common misconception that AI needs to be able to perform essentially
any task a human can do to induce the "collapse" of an industry. But really,
all it needs to do is make each lawyer 2x more efficient (by automating the
easy-to-automate tasks) and suddenly half of all lawyers are unemployed _even
though every lawyer employed today does some tasks that can 't be automated_.
That's a collapse.

~~~
erikbern
This assumes there's a fixed demand for legal help. You might as well envision
that the efficiency gains cause a huge drop in legal costs which unlocks a
huge latent demand. For instance software engineers are probably 10x more
efficient now compared to 20 years ago, but this does not mean mass
unemployment.

~~~
daemin
Akin to something that happened with accounting when computerised spreadsheets
came about. Instead of killing the field it just expanded it as more people
wanted advice and what-if scenarios explored.

~~~
notahacker
And it's ludicrously _obvious_ how much extra potential work there is for
legal contractors. Right now there are companies turning down revenue-
generating opportunities because the time/cost of scrutinising proposed
contract changes isn't worth it. Not to mention a huge number of agreements
done on a "standard contract, no exceptions" basis for the same reasons. If
automation allows these to be turned around in hours, for a fraction of the
price, the variation and complexity in standard contracts is going to multiply
exponentially.

Even if the process of checking the contracts is fully automated, there's
still a role for an associate/paralegal level lawyer (overseeing many more
contracts than their predecessors) to answer followup questions, because their
clients aren't going to navigate through case law summaries to get a more
thorough explanation of non-standard term 3.1b's applicability to their
specific situation if they can still phone somebody with a law degree.

~~~
chongli
Standard contracts exist for a variety of reasons, time/cost being one of
them. Another one I'd like to highlight is the principal-agent problem[0]. If,
due to automation, contracts went up by orders of magnitude in complexity then
clients would be exposed to a new set of risks with a legal basis that they do
not understand. The question then is: are these new, inscrutable risks
acceptable to a client? Perhaps not, unless they are already a very large
business.

[0].
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem)

------
danso
It's worth reposting this 2011 NYT article, "Armies of Expensive Lawyers,
Replaced by Cheaper Software"

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html)

> _When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department
> antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure
> task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the
> studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million,
> much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for
> months at high hourly rates._

> _But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence,
> “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a
> fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo
> Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000._

> _Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at
> computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents
> relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of
> specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded
> lawyers examining millions of documents._

~~~
shalmanese
The costs have remained largely static or even growing slightly because the
volume of documents is increasing faster than automation is driving down
costs.

------
rayiner
What the article fails to discuss is what advances in the technology will push
adoption over the tipping point. Are the algorithms going to get better? Are
faster computers going to make until-now infeasible techniques practical? Is
access to the Internet and big data going to make the difference? Legal
automation technology has actually been around for quite awhile, and has seem
limited uptake. So we're not at the point in the technology curve where we can
just assume exponential improvements in the quality of the technology.[1]

And the limited uptake has not been for want of trying. There are plenty of
firms that don't do document review in-house that would jump at the
opportunity to take bigger cases away from mega-firms by leveraging
technology. But the reality doesn't quite live up to the marketing. The
overwhelming trend has been towards outsourcing work previously done by
associates to low-priced contract attorneys, but even that shift seems to have
reached a point of equilibrium.

[1] A good example is spelling and grammar correction. Word isn't much better
at it than it was 15 years ago. You still can't do search and replace that
fixes conjugation and numerical agreement.

------
noisy_boy
As a person who is not part of the legal industry but had to deal with the
legal process, I would welcome technology becoming more prevalent in the legal
industry. My experience was especially tiring due to my residency and
jurisdiction of legal case, I was part of, being in two different countries.
So I would prepare the reply line by line running into pages during the weeks
leading up to the hearing, take an overnight flight to the country of
jurisdiction the day before hearing and all my lawyer did was turn up on the
day of hearing with a printed copy of my reply wrapped around the standard
legal header/footer and hand it to the judge. Everytime I turned up, I would
find a new junior handling my case who didn't know half of the details since
the firm takes on so many cases at once. Eventually I got tired and settled
just to avoid the stress of spending weekends in airplanes.

If I had the choice of registering my appearance via a video conference link,
it would have been so much more easier. If a never tiring bot would do the
research, it could check for references/past cases which a junior can simply
not check due to constraints of time/energy. My lawyer would have a much more
exhaustive list of points to check and assess which applies to my case. So on
and on.

Technology would result in law firms have to significantly re-evaluate what
they do and I think it is high time that happens.

~~~
n0us
I'm not sure what country you are referring to but in some places you can
video into the court room. I agree that's super convenient in comparison to
what you are describing but it isn't exactly AI

------
shadow0
Right about time. I had to deal with several immigration lawyers and it struck
my mind how simple and small their decision tree is. A simple deviation from a
standard case makes them want to "check and get back" which they probably do
mostly by asking their colleagues.

~~~
saryant
Isn't that what you would expect? Most cases fit within a predictable mold, on
others they consult with the rest of their firm (or case law,
journals—whatever else it is lawyers consult).

Why would that be a bad thing?

~~~
TheSoftwareGuy
It isn't, and I don't think shadow0 thinks it is either. The point I think
he's trying to make is that making an AI to do their job for them would not be
difficult

~~~
shadow0
Yup, exactly this.

------
cookiecaper
This is one industry that I would be happy to see go away. The concept that
the amount of justice and legal protection one citizen can effectively receive
depends on his/her ability to pay more than their opponent is very
troublesome, and has resulted in many gross inequities in the United States.

~~~
zhte415
And then the competition of AIs begins. Want a better AI? Pay more. Want the
best AI? Get one that trumps all others. The principles are great, but in
implementation, all is unknown, and I suspect more, not less, likely for
manipulation.

~~~
tluyben2
That's why they started OpenAI I guess? To try to prevent that from happening.
I agree with the parent that I would like that perverse and sick industry to
die but I think that has more chance by replacing the judges with AI than the
lawyers. Which won't happen in 15 years.

------
bsbechtel
I know AI is a hot topic these days, and the technology hurdles are finally
being overcome, but what about the human factor? It's human nature to want to
control things, and integrating AI in a meaningful way into your life means
giving up control of certain things. Delegating things to other humans is
enormously challenging for many people (in fact, it's a key reason many
startups fail!). I can't imagine delegating tasks with any sort of ambiguity
to a machine being any easier.

~~~
morgante
You're right that the human factor is huge. I work in this space and from all
our conversations it doesn't seem like any legal clients would be comfortable
working directly with an AI directly. They value the human touch and advice
provided by an actual lawyer.

That being said, there is already a division of labor in the legal industry
between client-facing work and more rote document analysis/prep. The latter is
where I think we'll see most of the automation: instead of being supported by
a bunch of associates, the partners will simply work with an AI.

Client interactions and higher-level decisions will still be entirely human.

~~~
dangoor
> Client interactions and higher-level decisions will still be entirely human.

I wonder if people ever said that about travel agencies?

I think there are plenty of things that people _today_ wouldn't be comfortable
with. I know many people that aren't comfortable with the idea of self-driving
cars. 15 years from now, the things people are comfortable with could change.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"I wonder if people ever said that about travel agencies?"

Yep, they sure did. Or consider the restaurant business. With all other
factors being equal, most of us would probably prefer a personal chef (or at
least an expert one), an attentive, high-quality wait staff, fine china, real
silverware, crystal glassware, linen tablecloths...

But they're not equal. In practice, McDonalds has a helluva lot more customers
than Wolfgang Puck.

If this happens, it's probably going eat the legal industry from the bottom
up. The rich will no doubt continue to have personal lawyers, just as they
still have personal chefs. It will be the guys who want to contest a speeding
ticket who will be the early adopters.

------
mheiler
More than AI I would like to see standardisation and templates for common law
problems. Like what creative commons did for copyright. Normal humans can use
and very quickly understand them.

I have absolutely no interest in reading dozens of terms of service or
purchase contracts I use every day, which are all wordy and hard to read, and
say basically the same.

------
astazangasta
Man, I remember in the nineties when SGI declared they were going to solve
protein folding. Still waiting on that one...

~~~
colechristensen
To be fair, NVIDIA was spawned out of several SGI engineers jumping ship as it
was sinking, and protein folding is primarily done on GPUs these days.

A person could imagine SGI not collapsing and bringing GPGPU computing
mainstream decades earlier.

------
sandworm101
Nearly half of my hours involve sitting down with clients to discuss their
needs. I don't go anywhere near courtrooms. Having to draft a legal brief for
a court, or even having to write a demand letter, means I have failed. I have
yet to see any hint of AI capable of making such judgment calls on even simple
matters.

How about this typical question: We shot a car commercial last month, but just
noticed a McDonalds logo visible behind the car. The commercial is only being
seen locally. Is it worth spending the money to pull the commercial and edit
out the logo? (Spitting out trademark caselaw isn't an answer.)

------
arikrak
Meanwhile, accounting firms look like their keeping their accountants, which
seems like an easier task to automate away..

~~~
genericresponse
The keyword there being "seems". Most of the firms that I've worked with are
actively automating or offshoring repetitive tasks. Much of the work that is
being done requires meaningful critical thinking.

------
ruairidhwm
Great article - I run a legal tech startup which automates some of the process
work around litigation - [https://rollrun.io](https://rollrun.io) and it's
been receiving a lot of interest.

There have been a lot of the 'lawyers will be replaced by robots' type
articles recently and I think the more positive spin is that lawyers will be
able to spend their time more wisely with the help of AI. As a junior lawyer I
spent a lot of time and effort doing tasks which were important to a case or a
transaction but were more suited to a machine (the inspiration behind
RollRun).

AI won't replace the skill and insight of a lawyer, but it will definitely
speed us up and I'm grateful for that. And I'm sure clients will be too when
it's reflected in fees.

------
cant_kant
At the top end, human expertise will still be necessary.

For example here is some recent work over the last few days at a leading
London law firm.

" ... is advising GE on the intellectual property, know-how and information
technology aspects of the potential sale of GE’s Equipment Finance and
Receivables Finance businesses in France and Germany to Banque Fédérative du
Crédit Mutuel.

We are working with Bredin Prat and Hengeler Mueller who advise on certain
French and German IP and technology aspects of the transaction."

[https://www.slaughterandmay.com/news-and-recent-
work/recent-...](https://www.slaughterandmay.com/news-and-recent-work/recent-
work/recent-work-items/2015/slaughter-and-may-is-advising-ge---ip-know-how-
and-it-aspects-of-potential-sale-of-equipment-finance-and-receivables-finance-
businesses.aspx)

" ... advised Santander UK Group Holdings plc on its issue under its EUR 30
billion Euro Medium Term Note Programme of JPY 3,000,000,000 0.557 per cent.
Notes due 2018 and JPY 27,000,000,000 0.787 per cent. Notes due 2020. The
Notes are dual-listed and have been admitted to listing and trading on the
Global Exchange Market of the Irish Stock Exchange and the TOKYO PRO-BOND
Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Inc.

Mizuho International plc and Nomura International plc acted as Joint Lead
Managers on the issuances."

[https://www.slaughterandmay.com/news-and-recent-
work/recent-...](https://www.slaughterandmay.com/news-and-recent-work/recent-
work/recent-work-items/2015/slaughter-and-may-advised-santander-uk-group-
holdings-plc---issue-under-its-eur-30-billion-euro-medium-term-note-
programme.aspx)

Bespoke work like this will still have human lawyers guiding and monitoring
the course of the transaction.

At this level, the cost of elite lawyers is less than a rounding error on the
balance sheet.

~~~
casaloma
This misses that:

(1) Though the work in aggregate may be highly complex, it is disaggregatable.
A very significant portion of the overall cost of these bespoke matters is
composed of automable work (e.g., diligence, preparing closing documents).
Humans may guide and monitor, but that could exist with significant changes to
how legal work gets done.

(2) While "the cost of elite lawyers is less than a rounding error on the
balance sheet”, most serious companies (e.g., GE) take efficiency very
seriously in their businesses overall. Why would they not expect and push for
it with their outside lawyers?

------
blazespin
We need an economic system so everyone can participate in the benefit of AI
and also significant economic incentives for AI to be optimized to do work for
people rather than be self aware. Once this is in place there should be no
reason not to push forward as fast as possible.

------
yk
Funny thought on automated lawyers, to some extend lawyers are used to create
standardized communication, aka contracts. So a law AI (lAI) would mean I give
a natural language contract, my lAI translates to legalese and sends it to the
lAI of the other guy which translates back from legalese to natural language.
So legalese becomes just an interchange format for contracts, a badly designed
protocol used only because we could not figure out how to transition to a
better one. (Obvious JavaScript joke is obvious.)

------
ZoeZoeBee
I have a theory that about a third of all people's jobs exist simply to define
a reason for having said job, lawyers even more so. The only ones incapable of
seeing that AI will remove the need for many lawyers are lawyers who's job
already is largely just them justifying the need for their services

------
teambob
AI may not replace lawyers themselves. But in my dealings with lawyers basic
technology will mean that 1 lawyer can do the work of three.

For example: nothing is OCRed. So if a lawyer needs to get a section of a
document they have to remember where it is.

There is some basic MS Word templating but really most law firms are stuck in
the 19th century

~~~
stan_rogers
There's likely still more than a little residual sting left from the era of
WordPerfect 5.1, where there _was_ a degree of sophistication (and sometimes
enormous expense) that looked stable for a long time... then simply vanished.
It's been 20 years, but there's something about the experience of having too
much of your knowledge trapped inside machines you can't (practically) use
anymore that's a little bit scary, and just doing the same thing with another
word processor (that obsoletes its old files every now and then) isn't
something most people would look forward to doing. Things will get better, but
memories have to fade and assurances need to be built first.

------
dinkumthinkum
This is sort of what's wrong with HN lately. There seems to be a sweeping
majority of Singularity believers that just take "AGI in 30-50 years" as just
an obvious inevitability. So therefore we just go straight into SciFi mode and
make all kinds of speculation with that premise. Then, this couples with this
sort of, I don't know how to explain it, maybe its like an uncritically overly
anti-establishment or "naively disruptive" current that just collectively nods
like "Oh yeah, the traditional law firm is dead meat."

It's surprising to m,e as I believe the community is largely made up of
technologists, that I never see much questioning the fundamental claims here.

For that wet dream of that Internet Bayes Theorem Religion, that I will not
name, to come true, it needs to first be possible and second, there must br
credible, serious people to actually be working on it. Granted, artificial
intelligence is a very hot area of research. However, for anyone that is
either a researcher in this field, a graduate student in the field, or just
someone actually very current on the latest papers and the current research
programs, knows this is AGI of the SciFi sort is not really what is being
worked on.

Not to go into all of the field but sure there are many interesting things
happening in pattern recognition, NLP, machine learning and data mining and
much work done with things like convolusional neural networks ..... but I'm
sorry to say that these an AGI Overlord do not make. They are fancy techniques
that yield very powerful and interesting results but in consideration of an
AGI they are rather boring and banal.

Largely, the techniques have been discontinuous incremental improvements on
reasonably simple ideas from the 1950s and 1960 but now utilizing massive
parallelism. Unfortunately, I think, for AGI a non-trivial number of
techniques are rooted in statistical and probabilistic methods, which I think
anyone would agree is probably a a wrong track toward intuitive and creative
problem solving.

It's not that those of us critical of AGI proclamations think that it is
impossible, that would be rather bold, or that we think humans are magical or
something. We probably just think that our brains, or even abstractly "true
intelligence", are things that are unlikely able to be simulated by something
like a Turing Machine. Any skeptic knows that extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence. And I gotta tell ya, the way facial recognition works
or even Watson, ain't it.

Also, I will say, just because something in the world is a certain way or if
it is not exactly like Uber, does not mean it is necessarily a bad thing ....
I'm just sayin' ....

An AGI Overlord would probably not be like the wild-eyed disruptor but more
contemplative and understanding of the world as being very complex.

~~~
EliRivers
To follow on with your points, if the term "AI" had never been coined, and
Terminator (and other such) movies had never been made, all the breathless
articles would be about "learning algorithms iterated quickly, with simple
inputs, simple outputs and a clear measure of success to help with the
feedback".

Nobody would be under any illusion that this was anything we could label
"intelligence".

------
acd
Is there automated service that takes long end user agreements and makes them
easily understandable?

There is Terms of service didnt read but that seem to be manual.
[https://tosdr.org/](https://tosdr.org/)

------
xbmcuser
I think Ai will take away the advantage larger firms have over smaller firms
or individual lawyers. Large firms can and do bury small opposition firm or
lawyers in grunt work that wastes time and people with few resources give up.

------
fiatmoney
The phrase "structural collapse" does appear, to be fair, but what the report
actually talks about is the hollowing out of low- to mid-level associate class
that exists to do things like documents review and straightforward searches,
not any reduction in the actual impact of law firms. Law firms will still
exist, because (unsurprisingly!) they are legally mandated to exist. If you
attempt to "disrupt" the legal profession as a non-lawyer you will be visited
first by lawyers, and then by unfriendly men with guns. If you attempt to
disrupt it seriously as a lawyer in a way that reduces its aggregate
importance, you will be made illegal.

------
x0054
2030? I would say 2025 or even earlier, and not just Law Firms. If you have a
white color job, AI is coming for it, and fast!

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I hope your joking or this sarcasm. If not, I think you should really read the
latest journals and conference proceedings to see if you still think that ...

~~~
tluyben2
As others said already; you only need more efficiency, not full AGI to do
that. And that simply is already happening.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
They can say but that it still isn't true. Read the journals. Many of these
professions which are supposed to disappear cannot actually be "made to
disappear" because of a slightly better version of a primitive algorithm. It
seems pretty obvious if you just stop and think about what would actually need
to happen.

Autonomous vehicles, fine. If you ignore all the things that currently make
transportation complicated, it's a fairly simple problem. I mean hell in the
1800s, they just put the vehicles on tracks with an engine and they were done.
But most "white collar job" roles, if you get past cynical jokes, are actually
well beyond the state of the art of AI research.

I mean, I love science fiction; I'm a big fan. But I'm also like a realist ...

~~~
tluyben2
I do not think they will disappear any time soon but I believe you need less
people per case. So maybe there will be more cases and thus still the same
amount or more lawyers required but one lawyer being able to do more cases
assisted by some form of AI. And yes, most complete jobs can not (yet) be
taken over but let's not forget the financials; if you can replace someone
costing $40k per year by a less efficient service costing $10/mo then people
will do it even if it does not fully replace the person. There are a lot of
factors in that but for instance my accountant fired most of his staff when
the SAAS package he uses got efficient enough; his right hand and him have to
work slightly harder but he saves a very significant amount of money.

------
n0us
This article spells a doomsday scenario for the legal industry but having
worked in a law firm during college I don't find that scenario to be very
plausible.

Some legal work is just rote paperwork and perhaps much of this could be
automated but it still requires a person to sign off on it etc. It remains to
be seen whether this will just reduce the demand for lawyers. You are
effectively just increasing the supply of legal services so while the quantity
of services demanded (assuming some arbitrary quantifiable unit) will
increase. It is not immediately clear that fewer lawyers will be in demand, I
could see AI lowering the cost/barrier to entry for people seeking services
and therefore more actual lawyers being required.

The rest of legal work is not just rote paper work and perhaps cannot be
automated in the near future. If one person sues another person, I don't see
any type of AI being capable of just calculating their way around who the
problem and spitting out an answer for who gets what. Such a system that
manages to account for every edge case would have to be unimaginably complex.
You don't hire a lawyer to handle regular repeatable tasks that are well
suited for computers, you hire them to handle things when something happens
that is out of the ordinary or to consult on circumstances that are specific
to you as an individual.

Law is also a field where reputation is tremendously important, and reputation
isn't the type of problem that you can just engineer your way out of. Hundreds
of years of tradition are not just going to be upended over night by some kid
with a laptop because it isn't that sort of problem.

A prime target for AI is research. I could have saved a ton of time by
scanning a document that gets OCR and then does a bunch of NLP to suggest
related primary and secondary sources from a database. The specific algorithms
aren't really that important but it would be a nice tool to augment the
practice not replace it.

It's also important to note that the legal industry moves at a snails pace
compared to the tech industry, people have a tendency to do things the way
they've always been done and I don't think it is as prime for disruption as
people on the outside from the tech industry would like to think. They will
have a big impact to be sure but it isn't just going to crash like a tidal
wave over night and put all these people out of jobs.

A further barrier is that all of this stuff still has to be adopted. Law is a
very domain specific field that requires a lot of time and study, so is AI.
The intersection of people who have experience in both is very slim indeed so
the value proposition for lawyers at the top of their field who would be
making these decisions is going to be a hard sell. It's going to be even
harder when they realize it might decrease their billable hours.

tl;dr; AI will augment the legal field, not replace it. This viewpoint comes
from my experience working in a law firm with software designed to automate
some tasks, not pure speculation like this article seems to provide.

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melted
Lawyers won't allow it, I'm sure.

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uvesten
Wohoo!

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stretchwithme
That's fine, as long as religion and faulty economics are also exposed as
completely illogical by AI.

~~~
justinsingh
Religion, that's what you want AI researchers to spend resources on? Even if
"exposed as completely illogical", it would not stop religion from helping
people live their lives with comfort and guidance. I'm not saying everyone
needs religion, but it does help many people. What reaction are you expecting
the world to have in the scenario that AI shows religion to be illogical?

~~~
stretchwithme
Religion has hurt a great many people too.

Religious arguments are full of logical fallacies. Getting those pointed out a
non-human with no axe to grind might help a lot of people find there way out
of this trap more quickly.

When I was 22, I remember a taped debate about religion I had borrowed from my
brother. It helped me figure out that there really was no proof for all the
assertions that I had accepted as true.

Being able to reach that conclusion without being in a debate myself was very
useful. I wasn't trying to protect my self image or save someone else.

In much the same way, computer intelligence might be just the thing many need
to help them out of the maze. Especially if they can have a conversation with
it and it can precisely point out an error. And if the same intelligence can
deal successfully with other complicated problems and negotiations.

~~~
tluyben2
But you can do that as a human too. The problem is that all ends with 'but you
cannot prove that He does not exist ans the bible says people will try to
discredit Him'. Religious people are not all to rational usually so why even
have the conversation? In the EU I see religion dying rapidly; I live in a
tiny (40odd people with a bigger 100 people village in the valley next to it)
village in the south of Spain where I moved down to from Amsterdam. In
Amsterdam I was used to people being atheist. Even my maroccan friends who do
go to the mosques only go because it is social thing not because they believe.
Same for my Jewish friends. In Spain I thought the old men and women at least
would believe and I was surprised to find that they actually almost all do
not. 'Don't be silly, I go to church because after that we drink a lot' says
my neigbour.

Not sure why the US is so religious but the education and lifestyle will kill
it. No AI needed.

~~~
wyclif
_Not sure why the US is so religious but the education and lifestyle will kill
it. No AI needed_

I think you profoundly underestimate the power of both religion and philosophy
on the soul and imagination of man. Back in the 16th century, the "new
learning" confidently predicted it would sweep away religious belief and other
forms of "antiquated" thinking. How silly and facile that seems now. The
fedora-clad New Atheists are no different—arrogantly predicting the demise of
something far more powerful and permanent than they are.

~~~
tluyben2
Like said besides the US and the middle east I do not see that in reality. And
I do not underestimate the power of religion or philosophy: I just think only
the latter will remain. Or hope it will. And it is not really silly yet: that
is only a few 100 years ago. It takes time to get all humanity out of poverty,
not dying young and educated. If we still believe in some intelligent
entity(ies) that architected the universe and life in 2000 years you can call
it silly. I for one find it silly that people believe in such an entity while
I was raised and schooled as a christian until I was 20. But I started
doubting it and asking questions that were answered with 'the bible says so ;
do not doubt!' at a very young age. Which has the whole: everything points to
this all being a nice story to keep the people quiet and docile and no science
to back it up.

~~~
wyclif
_you can call it silly_

But I didn't call it silly; I said it should be taken seriously. And frankly,
"because science says so!" can be just as dogmatic (or even more so) than
religion. "Science" isn't a monad anyway; we can't simply reference one
overarching, completely non-contradictory science. And there are Christian
approaches to science that, in fact, do not resort to "do not doubt." And
that's just for starters—it's very misleading to posit a "religion or science:
choose one" duality given the number of Christians in STEM professions, from
Faraday to Larry Wall.

As far as "not sure why the US is so religious"—I don't think the US is more
religious than other cultures, or why you would single the US out for
approbation in that way. It's probably the case that Christianity has
influenced Western civilisation and that has been expressed in a particular
manner in the US on the Constitution with its enumerated rights and ordered
liberties. The influence of Christianity on the West has much to do with why
Western cultures are advanced in terms of technology, literacy, general
learning, and the arts, even when those things are used for non-religious
ends.

~~~
tluyben2
I do think the US is more religious than other developed nations. Take high
GDP places like Scandinavia and Swiss and Netherlands which are atheist. That
is why. And I agree with you about the influence. I do not understand how
educated people think this can work and why the US with smart people works
like that.

~~~
wyclif
The USA isn't high GDP? Fascinating.

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vorg
The true purpose of the legal profession, as with other jobs like accounting
and IT, is to provide something to do for people to keep them from spending
their free time challenging entrenched power structures. If bots can do some
job in law, then the law will change to require more human audits of such
work.

~~~
vorg
Because my comment follows guidelines, I presume some disagree with this
opinion. Perhaps you're young and haven't worked out the true meaning of most
paid work. I remember reading about a study about 15 years ago that assessed
what proportion of various countries jobs actually contributed directly to
production, e.g. mining, agriculture, etc, as opposed to "made-up" jobs like
law, taxation, etc. Australia had a mere 7%, though other developed countries
weren't much higher.

Not many jobs in law and justice contribute to catching and rehabilitating
criminals who break laws that hurt others, and even then everything's done in
triplicate (prosecution, defense, judge). Most legal jobs revolve around
crimes that don't harm others, and civil and business law.

If the types of people who don't go into business don't have jobs, they might
revolt and in some other way challenge entrenched power structures. So the
government makes laws to maximize the number of people in work.

