
Legal AI and the Industrialisation of Cognition (2017) - raleighm
https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2018/08/03/summer-re-post-legal-ai-the-industrialisation-of-cognition/
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rayiner
At first I thought this was a fiction story in a hypothetical 2035. The
dramatic description of legal technology is completely at odds with my
experience. I’m a young, technologically savvy guy who happens to be a lawyer,
and I’ve never even used, for example, “AI” discovery. Not for want of
economic motivation—I’ve pored through documents manually in contingency cases
where having an instant AI answer would have been a god send. But what the
article makes it seem like legal tech can do, and what it can actually do, are
two things with a vast chasm between.

For example, “AI” discovery requires tons of handholding and careful
training/QA. The process is so complicated, it’s really only practical for
very large document sets. Ironically, these huge document sets only tend to
arise in highly valuable commercial litigation, where clients have strong
incentives to demand human second level review anyway, mitigating much of the
cost advantage. In practice, the biggest advance in discovery in the last
10-15 years has actually been culling document sets based in search terms
(“fake” NEAR “testing results”).

The article also takes a jab at legal outsourcing and makes it seem like AI
has had a bigger impact than outsourcing. Not so. The trend of clients
demanding that low level work be outsourced to contract attorneys has had ten
times the impact on law firm economics compared to any legal technology
invented in the last decade.

At bottom, the article is based on a fundamental mistake about the industry:

> What kind of repeat buyer lets the seller push the price up every year for
> doing the same thing in the same way, where the product stays the same and
> there is no improvement in the outcome? One answer to that is: a buyer who
> is faced by a monopoly.

Today’s clients are savvy. They’ll bring in half a dozen firms to pitch any
substantial matter, getting dozens of hours of free legal analysis from each
just as table stakes. Fees are capped, rates are discounted, and success-based
fee arrangements are routine. The legal industry is stiffly competitive, even
at the very top. (Thanks to conflicts rules, consolidation in law has been
limited. So there are _dozens_ of firms that you would consider just the “top
firms”).

On the whole, lawyers keep getting more expensive for the same reason as
programmers in Silicon Valley or nannies in Manhattan. The stakes are high
compared to the costs, and there is a rush to quality even in light of
economic concerns.

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HeadInTheClouds
I think that AI/Machine learning has made a big impact on the Ediscovery part
of the legal industry. The use of ML commonly known as Predictive Coding does
appear to reduce the number of hours required to find relevant documents in a
large corpus.

There is a lot of noise about the use of AI in other areas of law, but I
suspect (in common with other industries) this is just part of the hype cycle.
That is not to say that the use of AI is not on the rise, but the article
likely overstates its use.

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artificiallawya
Re. Overstating use, far from it. This piece is from 2017, since then adoption
of NLP/ML systems has rapidly grown among the leading law firms eg AmLaw 100
and UK 100. Even excluding ediscovery systems the use of AI Tech for review
work has hugely increased - sufficient to keep a daily blog going just to keep
up with all that is happening. Don’t get complacent. Things among larger firms
are starting to change.

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nobody271
If the law were automated how would the wealthy get preferential treatment?
Entering the legal system rich vs entering the legal system poor are two
entirely different things. Maybe you will have to pay for compute cycles or
additional law modules or something like that. ...I tend to think control over
the law needs to be arrested from human hands if we want a fair system. But
people don't want a fair system. They want a system that benefits them. I
wonder if AI in the legal system will just be an internal revolution.

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joshuaheard
I think the author is confusing "AI" with "automation". While the legal
industry (among others) has been slow to embrace automation, it has adopted
word processing, text searches, and case management software. I don't think
true AI is there yet in the legal, or any, industry.

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niklasd
I find the article is badly written. Being a lawyer, a coder and interested in
Legal Tech, I still find it hard to read or unterstand some
sentences/sections. The author also falls short of mentioning any specific
workflows that could be automated (which there are many) or any specific
programs or companies that are really changing the legal landscape (which
there are not many).

From my experience real AI Legal Tech is yet rarely used (at least in the
European legal market). And I have yet to see a company I trust that will
change that soon.

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artificiallawya
Thanks. There are over 30 legal AI companies working just in doc review. If
you are interested in this area then check out previous pieces that cover a
very wide range of use cases. There are well over 50+ companies using NLP/ML
in the legal sector. If firms in your country are not then they are perhaps
just a bit behind the curve. Come to London and it may change your mind.

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techbio
I hope someone will treat the concept in greater depth than I can, but in my
mind it seems imperative to universally tax robots and AI for _some measure_
of their income, to balance new distortions placed upon real people's innate
capacities to produce. I'm especially interested in a convincing argument of
why not to, as none have come past me yet.

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jon_richards
Where do we _want_ to be? I'd argue we want full automation and some form of
universal basic income (probably implemented through reverse taxation).

Taxing _automation_ over corporate profit makes that reality further away
because it lessens incentives to automate. Increasing corporate/estate/etc
taxes leaves the incentives to automate intact.

It's like arguing that we should tax renewable energy because we're going to
run out of oil eventually anyway.

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paultopia
[content warning: plug for paywalled academic article I wrote]. If the (a bit
overheated) claims in this article are true, it probably isn't good for social
equality---at least, not in the absence of a sustained effort to build what in
effect are social ventures (memo to YC...) around legal AI. Just building
machine learning into existing legal workflows will probably reduce the legal
costs for the rich and powerful without trickling down to the poor, who often
face social in addition to financial barriers to legal services. Article I
wrote making this argument at some length:
[https://utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/utlj.2017-0047](https://utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/utlj.2017-0047)

