Every time when a professional sector stands in the beginning of new technology, discussions arise among employees whether this technology will disrupt how they operate and whether certain career paths become redundant. There is no exception for the legal ecosystem, where they are facing the smart information technology such as artificial intelligence, transforming the legal ecosystem in various ways. In a study of McKinsey & Company about the possible automation of 800 professions, they found that robots are able to replace 23 per cent of the jobs currently held by legal officers (Johnson, 2017).
A study of Deloitte (2018) suggests that by 2037 the execution of 100,000 legal roles (In the United Kingdom) will be automated. In addition, they expect that law firms will experience a “tipping point” for new talent strategy by 2020 and advise all law firms to prepare themselves for a technology-transforming wave. Meaning, they advise that legal firms should focus on attracting more IT specialised people instead of only focusing on only legal employees. Moreover, Deloitte (2018) points out the fact that employees in the legal segment should put away their fear of failure that can be brought upon by AI, and that they should develop internal AI practices. Often, AI enhances what humans do and take up legal activities, resulting in enlarging the freedom to take up more complex tasks such as negotiating deals, appearing in court and advising their clients. In many disciplines is has been shown that AI frees the hands of specialists, allowing them to focus on deeper thinking they never got time for before (source documentary about AI in medicine). Law is an evidence-based industry; lawyers have to explain how and why they use certain arguments. Thus, the information that is used to base arguments on, is crucial and needs to be verified, so the decision-making process should be provided in a transparent matter (Banavar, 2016).
Law firms are transitioning; their strategies are more and more focusing on implementing or exploring the use of AI systems, for large firms (>1000 employees) this is even more than 90%, a study of US legal managing partners showed (Clay & Seeger, 2017). Marchant (2017) listed the AI application in legal practices: First of all, Technology Assisted Review (TAR) pioneered in legal practice as AI application, and is 50 times more efficient in document review than humans. Then, Legal Analytics (big data, algorithms and AI) are able to make predictions trends they extract from data. In addition, Practice Management Assistants such as the software ROSS, RAVN or Kira focus on specific legal areas and become ‘expert systems’. Another software is Legal bots, which are interactive online systems where customers can be helped with questions or situations. Lastly, algorithms (a very basic form of AI) is helping Legal Decision Making; Microsoft and U.S. Legal Services Corporation are making machine learning portals together, which can be beneficial for people who cannot afford legal help.
Clearly, legal firms are investing more and more into information technology software. How will this influence the employees that work within legal firms? As current research suggests, legal officers will distribute their work differently in the future, focusing on other deeper and more complicated tasks. More basic procedures will be processed quicker, so it will increase overall efficiency. In addition, decision-making is aided by intelligent information systems, analyzing an extensive amount of information in seconds. This is aligned to prior research in information technology area, which has been mostly directed at how the efficiency can be improved on how a user makes a particular decision, next to improving the decision-effectiveness (Pearson & Shim, 1995).
References:
Banavar, G. (2016). What It Will Take for Us to Trust AI. Harvard Business Review [Online]. Retrieved January 16, 2019, from https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-it-will-take-for-us-to-trust-ai
David Johnson, Find Out If a Robot Will Take Your Job, Time (Apr. 19, 2017), http://time.com/4742543/ robots-jobs-machines-work/
J.M. Pearson, J.P. Shim, An empirical investigation into DSS 1187 structures and environments, Decision Support Systems 13 1188 (1995) 141 – 158
This is definitely an interesting topic
Actually, this paper (https://link-springer-com.eur.idm.oclc.org/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-45868-7_7) gives quite a good distinction of AI in this space, speaking of strong and weak AI. Strong AI, which is AI that works without any human interaction, is said not to be around in the near future. Weak AI, on the other hand, is what we are starting to experience and which can be seen in the legal sector. To refer to your heading, based on this article, one could argue that we do still need lawyers in the future, as the AI in use still needs humans to directly program it and steer it into the right direction. It can only help with specific tasks which does not include the highly complex cases a lawyer deals with.
Whilst you mostly touched upon back-end functions which help law firms in document reviews for due diligences etc., I think you might be interested in the fact that AI is also being used by the customer which, in turn, has the largest potential to do away with lawyers. This type of technology that enables customers to solve their own case is more being referred to as LawTech (in comparison to LegalTech which is meant for lawyers).
Hi Annika,
Thank you for your interesting reply! I agree, that machines will not fully take over the jobs of lawyers (in the near future) but that they will assist, as I explained in the post. I also agree with your point of the consumer making use of the legal services offered from online sources (or even new tech entrants to the legal market). This could be done cheaper than hiring a lawyer, so this is for sure a threat to lawyers. However, for the more easier issues there are already institutions (for free, subsidized by the government), that help you with legal issues (at least in the Netherlands).
Good read, Sudevi! Always been fascinated by how technology is going to take over various industries, yet also very interesting to see how AI can encourage collaboration between humans and technology rather than overruling us entirely. You do mention that humans will shift their focus and concentrate more on the more detailed and complicated tasks. Don’t you think it’ll be a matter of time before machines will be able to complete, or at least assist in these tasks? And how will this influence the billable hours of lawyers?
Hi Tom,
Thank you, great to hear you enjoyed reading it. Very interesting question you points out, for sure it is a matter of time that machines will assist lawyers, which will impact the billable hours of lawyers. However, they are also able to do more and go more in depth because of the intelligence of the machines. Also, they could choose another strategy such as a price for a service, instead of hours. Nevertheless, the whole landscape will change, and also potential new (tech) entrants will go into the legal market.
When you watch somehow dated movies or TV-shows involving lawyers, you really see how this can change their job tremendously: they are seen scrolling through archives, trying to find previous cases to cite in court (at least, this is as far as my common law knowledge can suggest), looking for a specific name or word among a pile of papers:;if they make sure that all of their sources are digitalized, they can now just use Command + F to do that.
Hi Alberto,
Yes, funny is that right! They put so much effort in finding the right precedent. Most of the sources are already digitized however, but because there are so many different sources it is hard to exactly find the right ones for creating a defense.
Dear Sudevi, very interesting and multifaceted discussion! I would like to add the potential that blockchain has to contribute to the change of the legal tech industry. Blockchain nowadays goes beyond its famous cryptocurrency application, Blockchain 1.0. Smart Contracts build the second generation of blockchain. Within the legal industry, contracts are currently drafted, reviewed and executed by lawyers. As code embedded in the blockchain infrastructure, smart contracts can do all of this automatically. Most transforming, they execute themselves automatically, if the prespecified conditions apply. Thus, having the potential to take over parts of lawyers’ daily work.
See e.g. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-981-13-6086-2.pdf
Hi Maren,
Thank you for taking the time to address this subject. Indeed, I agree, Blockchain technology also offers great potential in the legal market. I read in the journal you suggested that they have already tried this automated contract creation in the Dutch market. Very interesting!
Hi Sudevi,
Interesting post!
I think it is actually a good thing that there is more AI within legal services, as this indeed gives more time to the lawyers to focus on more complicated tasks, especially if AI is way better at detecting certain things than humans. I think especially if the tasks are more administrative of nature, it is a good way to let AI handle these situations in order for the lawyers to dive deeper in cases and prepare for trials etc. Do you think there could be actual downsides of using AI within law firms, or have there been certain negative cases already?
Hi Mane,
Thank you! As for every technology, I think there are also negative sides to these developments. For instance, there will potentially be online legal chatbots where people (without resources) can get legal advice. Still, it can be hard for AI to be correct 100% of the times, because context might not always be detectable. In this way, people can start to rely on these (cheap) services, and make wrong legal decisions which are very harmful. However, I am sure that with the right regulations these disadvantages can be fought against.