This article describes how lawyers themselves might become the “victims” of innovation and, hence, draws a rather gloomy picture of the future of lawyering. It argues that technologiical innovation in machine intelligence will disrupt the legal profession and lead to competition among lawyers liker never seen before.
But the article also lists a number of reasons why the law itself, by establishing legal barriers in the form of regulations, may not be able to prevent this innovative disruption to the legal profession:
- “the ethics rules do not prohibit lawyers from employing machine intelligence to perform work previously or potentially done by lawyers [and may even require it].”
- “The unauthorized practice laws have not been applied successfully to police machine intelligence products [so that they become more and more de facto deregulated which again] provide[s] a greater incentive to developing more sophisticated and profitable machine intelligence services”
I think the authors fails to properly account for the way that technology creates new job opportunities whenever it renders other positions obsolete. Theories that the “rise of machines” will lead to widespread unemployment have existed since the industrial revolution, yet it hasn’t happened yet. Sure, technology has replaced some jobs but it has also created new ones. Often, the jobs created by technology pay better than the jobs they replace. This is because technology increases productivity, and people who produce more typically get paid more. While technology may eliminate some jobs in the legal field, I think there is reason to believe it will ultimately allow lawyers to deliver better services to their clients.
I agree with Johnny as to the effects of innovation in this field, low value work that can be done by a machine should be done by a machine and I think that we should be encouraging innovation in the legal field, not discouraging it due to fear.
My favorite quote concerning entrepreneurship in the law doesn’t come from where you might expect. Instead, it is housed in the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct. The first rule, Rule 1.1 in the comments, sets forth that attorneys must, “keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.” This quote shows a relatively recent, within the last six years, shift in the way attorneys see technology. It is now more important than ever to use technology as a tool, and attorneys are now expected to use that tool at the risk of a loss of competence.
The full quote is here:
“To maintain the requisite knowledge and skill, a lawyer should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology, engage in continuing study and education and comply with all continuing legal education requirements to which the lawyer is subject.” ABA Comment to the Model Rules 1.1
I agree with both you and John that new technology always creates new job opportunities, or at least alaways did so far, and I’m confident that there will be an ongoing high demand for lawyers and especially for creative lawyering. However, we have also seen that these job opportunities might often require different skills or even may arise in very different areas. Hence, there still might be a decrease in the demand for lawyers but the consequences for the overall societal welfare may be outweight by an increased demand for engineers and information and computer scientists.
I further agree with you that new and more sophisticated technologies usually lead to better services and, hence, should generally be encouraged. However, personally, I have not yet seen a significant decrease in legal fees for “simple legal work,” even though lawyers have become more and more efficient during the last decades. But I can only speak about my experiences based on my work and studies in Switzerland. Moreover, as we have encountered in the context of health care, new technologies can even lead to higher costs for certain services.
I thought the article was very interesting. I agree with some ideas and disagree with others. The article states that there are five areas that machine intelligence will dramatically change in the near future: (1) discovery (2) legal search; (3) document generation; (4) brief and memoranda generation; and (5) prediction of case outcomes. I think that there is definitely potential for technology to play a larger role in legal search and document generation, but I disagree that it will be able to accurately predict the outcome of cases. I disagree because I don’t think there is any way for technology to predict the determinations made by a jury comprised of random members of a community. Technology would not be able to predict who would sit on the jury and what role their individual life experiences may play in their ultimate decision of the case. There are far too many unpredictable variables that are not known until the day of the trial when the jury is picked and even after knowing who is sitting on the jury, it would be impossible to know everything about these individuals to get a better idea of how their background might influence their decisions.
To put more simply, as long as juries are comprised of random individuals from the community, technology will not be able to predict the outcome of cases with complete certainty. It may be able to take patterns and past rulings into consideration, but thats nothing more than a human lawyer already does.
I thought the article was very interesting. I agree with some ideas and disagree with others. The article states that there are five areas that machine intelligence will dramatically change in the near future: (1) discovery (2) legal search; (3) document generation; (4) brief and memoranda generation; and (5) prediction of case outcomes. I think that there is definitely potential for technology to play a larger role in legal search and document generation, but I disagree that it will be able to accurately predict the outcome of cases. I disagree because I don’t think there is any way for technology to predict the determinations made by a jury comprised of random members of a community. Technology would not be able to predict who would sit on the jury and what role their individual life experiences may play in their ultimate decision of the case. There are far too many unpredictable variables that are not known until the day of the trial when the jury is picked and even after knowing who is sitting on the jury, it would be impossible to know everything about these individuals to get a better idea of how their background might influence their decisions.
To put more simply, as long as juries are comprised of random individuals from the community, technology will not be able to predict the outcome of cases with complete certainty. It may be able to take patterns and past rulings into consideration, but thats nothing more than a human lawyer already does.
I agree with Abigail. I’d be interested to hear from AI experts about how machine intelligence can predict how juries handle issues like relative or comparative credibility of witnesses.