Artificial Intelligence and the Legal Profession

I found our discussion on the effects of artificial intelligence on the legal profession very interesting. Personally, I assume that the legal profession is less threatened by AI than other areas. This article gives one explanation for this. It reviews a book in which three economists argue that AI will, despite all current fears and expectations, mainly change and rationalize the way of making predictions but not provide a substitute for judgment. This argument would support the assumption that AI might—to some extent—put the jobs of paralegals and other research-focused professions at risk, but not the jobs where judgment plays a prominent role. I would argue that lawyers need judgment in every instance when they assess the outcome of a case. Outcomes of cases are often based on multiple factors (political opinions of judges, individual preferences of jury members, and so forth), which cannot all be translated into numbers that could be analyzed by a machine. Thus, I believe that the judgments of lawyers, based on their experience, are not likely to be replaced by AI.

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