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AI will cause “structural collapse” of law firms by 2030

207 points by bootload 11y ago

shadow0 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      Yup, exactly this.
  - chii 11y ago
    it's not bad per se, but the expense doesn't seem to be justified. Imagine if an expert system did the work instead, at a fraction of the cost!
    - stretchwithme 11y ago
      Should be less than a penny for many things, once all the patents expires. Of course, we still may be paying a person to do a reality check on what a computer comes up with. The same way we will pay a doctor to confirm that, yes indeed, that leg has to come off.
  - bpchaps 11y ago
    False dichotomy territory there. I had to deal with immigration lawyers for a friend about 2 years ago after deferred action took place. She was born in Mexico, but her parents came over here shortly after she was born. With deferred action, if you have a high school degree, are younger than 35, never left the US after you originally arrived here here and don't have anything on your "record" (which is a fuzzy thing in itself), you get a work permit with an SSN. Now.. my friend is the most organized person you'll ever meet. For whatever reason, she decided to keep all of her homework, documents, mail, etc from high school 8 years prior. She never left the US, got mostly As, was good standing on jrotc. As a small anecdote, she also just got top employee award at a thousand person company without even working there for a year. Really, she was the kind of person that should have had a little bit of wiggle room. Nope. She had a two month period of time that she couldn't find any documents from right after high school. They rejected her on the basis that she could have left the US at that time. It took 6 weeks to get a letter stating that. She immediately found some random mail and went through the whole process again. She got accepted, but it took another 6 weeks to get confirmation. THEN.. she had to 2 months to go to the SSN offices specially prepared for the "high traffic" where we were the only ones there, along with about 20 staff. Oh, and then her brother who's been pulled over for speeding multiple times, dropped out of high school (he got his GED in fairness)... got a work permit with extreme ease. Hell, he even filed late without even using a lawyer. Rant over, but you get the point. It's a frustrating process where there's a mold, but it's an ineffective baked-shit mold. Edit: I helped another friend out who had a somewhat uncommon situation that let her get a greencard without going through the usual process. When DHS said she was good to go, the SSN told us it was "impossible to input the alien number" because it didn't have the correct amount of digits and couldn't be typed in their system. We were told to fill out a form that would take 6 weeks to process. DHS and the SSN office both refused to work with each other and we weren't allowed to use cell phones in the building. When we tried again about a month later, the person at the counter gave her an SSN on the spot without any issue. Frustrating.
  - shadow0 11y ago
    I wasn't saying it's a bad thing. It just seems like a job that should be fairly simple to replace once AI reached certain level. A lot of lawyers seem to be dealing with very few types of standard cases for which they repeat the same routine and there is no any 'problem solving' involved when you really need a high level of expertise. That's like if you were a programmer and you had to develop the same kind of applications over and over again and when you could basically copy/paste most of your code from the previous projects.
  - Turing_Machine 11y ago
    Yeah, I would imagine that a large percentage of being a good lawyer is being able to recognize when a particular case is not a good candidate for routine handling. Same with doctors. On the surface, a case might be a good candidate for sending the patient home with aspirin (or whatever). Being able to recognize the unusual cases when that's not appropriate is where the real skill comes in. Sometimes, of course, both doctors and lawyers screw up on this.
- yetanotheracc 11y ago
  Same with medical professionals
x0054 11y ago
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!
- colechristensen 11y ago
  AI is just another abstraction, another tool to increase the power of the individual. A simple lever allows one person to do the work of many, human technological development is all about making fancier levers (and people bitching about how the next one will end society)
- chii 11y ago
  hah, apropo video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
- rtehfm 11y ago
  Similarly to how the industrial revolution 'disrupted' manual labor/blue collar jobs.
- dinkumthinkum 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    As others said already; you only need more efficiency, not full AGI to do that. And that simply is already happening.
    - dinkumthinkum 11y ago
      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 ...
astazangasta 11y ago
Man, I remember in the nineties when SGI declared they were going to solve protein folding. Still waiting on that one...
- colechristensen 11y ago
  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.
bsbechtel 11y ago
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.
- danharaj 11y ago
  > It's human nature to want to control things I don't think that's justified. I don't even know what it means. Am I ceding control to a computer when I use software? I love using software to take things out of my control. A mind boggling number of things relevant to my life are out of my control and I have no desire to control them. I'm not particularly special in this regard: Most of the things out of my control are voluntarily out of the control of millions of others. Human nature seems to be the rhetorical black box that justifies every claim about human beings.
- morgante 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    > 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.
n0us 11y ago
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.
blazespin 11y ago
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.
cant_kant 11y ago
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-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 https://www.slaughterandmay.com/news-and-recent-work/recent-... " ... 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-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 https://www.slaughterandmay.com/news-and-recent-work/recent-... 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 11y ago
  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?
noisy_boy 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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
cookiecaper 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
stretchwithme 11y ago
That's fine, as long as religion and faulty economics are also exposed as completely illogical by AI.
- justinsingh 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.
morgante 11y ago
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/
- jbhatab 11y ago
  Why isn't what you described possible with AI?
  - morgante 11y ago
    The high-level work? Let me first say that I don't think we will have human-level AGI by 2030. If we somehow do, all bets are off. The high-level work requires a large amount of creativity in developing nuanced strategies for a particular domain. It also involves integrating knowledge and ideas from a lot more than the law. Consider that the vast majority of intelligent humans who attempt to make it to partner don't make it. Top lawyers are highly skilled, and automating them away is not trivial. Also consider the trust factor. We've done some customer discovery in this space and most people would just not be comfortable working directly with an AI. This is especially true because a good portion of what partners are doing is human contact work with clients, courts, and opposing counsel. There's a lot of leverage which comes from being able to read and manipulate people which AI can't replicate easily. Note that I'm referring to the 2030 date specifically for this. I don't think lawyers (or, really, any current profession) will exist in 2100.
danso 11y ago
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 11y ago
  The costs have remained largely static or even growing slightly because the volume of documents is increasing faster than automation is driving down costs.
- harry-wood 11y ago
  That last paragraph is pretty much a description of google search is it not? That's what struck me about this article. It's describing AI as a thing which is coming in the future, but... knowledge mining document discovery tasks? The future is now! Google's AI (combined with the vast corpus of linked knowledge on the open web) is presumably already doing away with the need for a lot of low-level legal enquiries which would have previously been handled by law firms. I notice this article touches on the topic: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/22/opinions/barton-rise-and-fall-of-lawyers/ http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/22/opinions/barton-rise-and-f... "Nonprofits and government entities have put almost all of the raw materials of American law online and Google and other search engines have made that law easier to find than ever. An American with a smart phone now has more access to legal sources than most lawyers or judges did fifteen years ago." When stuff is made available on the open web for google (and other search engines) to index, that is the AI revolution right there. I say bring it on. Laws and court proceedings should be treated as public property. It should be put on the open web, permalinkable, annotatable, preferably with an explicit open license, so we can all benefit
arikrak 11y ago
Meanwhile, accounting firms look like their keeping their accountants, which seems like an easier task to automate away..
- genericresponse 11y ago
  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.
- teambob 11y ago
  That's not really true. Back in the 1980s most small and medium businesses still used paper based journals. All the people who were employed to do that are gone - one person now can do the job of about 6 people in the 1980s. Before the 1980s you had to do everything by post, not even fax. So you needed to follow up a lot more and talk a lot more on the phone. Better technology doesn't necessarily mean that people will be "replaced" but it generally has meant that fewer people can do the same job.
fiatmoney 11y ago
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.
teambob 11y ago
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
- deleted 11y ago
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- stan_rogers 11y ago
  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.
rayiner 11y ago
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.
vorg 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
thegasman 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
yk 11y ago
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.)
dinkumthinkum 11y ago
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.
mheiler 11y ago
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.
sandworm101 11y ago
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.)
uvesten 11y ago
Wohoo!
melted 11y ago
Lawyers won't allow it, I'm sure.
ruairidhwm 11y ago
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.
acd 11y ago
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/
ZoeZoeBee 11y ago
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
xbmcuser 11y ago
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.

207 points by bootload 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    Yup, exactly this.
- chii 11y ago
  it's not bad per se, but the expense doesn't seem to be justified. Imagine if an expert system did the work instead, at a fraction of the cost!
  - stretchwithme 11y ago
    Should be less than a penny for many things, once all the patents expires. Of course, we still may be paying a person to do a reality check on what a computer comes up with. The same way we will pay a doctor to confirm that, yes indeed, that leg has to come off.
- bpchaps 11y ago
  False dichotomy territory there. I had to deal with immigration lawyers for a friend about 2 years ago after deferred action took place. She was born in Mexico, but her parents came over here shortly after she was born. With deferred action, if you have a high school degree, are younger than 35, never left the US after you originally arrived here here and don't have anything on your "record" (which is a fuzzy thing in itself), you get a work permit with an SSN. Now.. my friend is the most organized person you'll ever meet. For whatever reason, she decided to keep all of her homework, documents, mail, etc from high school 8 years prior. She never left the US, got mostly As, was good standing on jrotc. As a small anecdote, she also just got top employee award at a thousand person company without even working there for a year. Really, she was the kind of person that should have had a little bit of wiggle room. Nope. She had a two month period of time that she couldn't find any documents from right after high school. They rejected her on the basis that she could have left the US at that time. It took 6 weeks to get a letter stating that. She immediately found some random mail and went through the whole process again. She got accepted, but it took another 6 weeks to get confirmation. THEN.. she had to 2 months to go to the SSN offices specially prepared for the "high traffic" where we were the only ones there, along with about 20 staff. Oh, and then her brother who's been pulled over for speeding multiple times, dropped out of high school (he got his GED in fairness)... got a work permit with extreme ease. Hell, he even filed late without even using a lawyer. Rant over, but you get the point. It's a frustrating process where there's a mold, but it's an ineffective baked-shit mold. Edit: I helped another friend out who had a somewhat uncommon situation that let her get a greencard without going through the usual process. When DHS said she was good to go, the SSN told us it was "impossible to input the alien number" because it didn't have the correct amount of digits and couldn't be typed in their system. We were told to fill out a form that would take 6 weeks to process. DHS and the SSN office both refused to work with each other and we weren't allowed to use cell phones in the building. When we tried again about a month later, the person at the counter gave her an SSN on the spot without any issue. Frustrating.
- shadow0 11y ago
  I wasn't saying it's a bad thing. It just seems like a job that should be fairly simple to replace once AI reached certain level. A lot of lawyers seem to be dealing with very few types of standard cases for which they repeat the same routine and there is no any 'problem solving' involved when you really need a high level of expertise. That's like if you were a programmer and you had to develop the same kind of applications over and over again and when you could basically copy/paste most of your code from the previous projects.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  Yeah, I would imagine that a large percentage of being a good lawyer is being able to recognize when a particular case is not a good candidate for routine handling. Same with doctors. On the surface, a case might be a good candidate for sending the patient home with aspirin (or whatever). Being able to recognize the unusual cases when that's not appropriate is where the real skill comes in. Sometimes, of course, both doctors and lawyers screw up on this.
yetanotheracc 11y ago
Same with medical professionals

x0054 11y ago

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!

colechristensen 11y ago
AI is just another abstraction, another tool to increase the power of the individual. A simple lever allows one person to do the work of many, human technological development is all about making fancier levers (and people bitching about how the next one will end society)
chii 11y ago
hah, apropo video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
rtehfm 11y ago
Similarly to how the industrial revolution 'disrupted' manual labor/blue collar jobs.
dinkumthinkum 11y ago
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 11y ago
  As others said already; you only need more efficiency, not full AGI to do that. And that simply is already happening.
  - dinkumthinkum 11y ago
    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 ...

astazangasta 11y ago

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

colechristensen 11y ago
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.

bsbechtel 11y ago

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.

danharaj 11y ago
> It's human nature to want to control things I don't think that's justified. I don't even know what it means. Am I ceding control to a computer when I use software? I love using software to take things out of my control. A mind boggling number of things relevant to my life are out of my control and I have no desire to control them. I'm not particularly special in this regard: Most of the things out of my control are voluntarily out of the control of millions of others. Human nature seems to be the rhetorical black box that justifies every claim about human beings.
morgante 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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.

n0us 11y ago

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.

blazespin 11y ago

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.

cant_kant 11y ago

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-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 https://www.slaughterandmay.com/news-and-recent-work/recent-... " ... 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-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 https://www.slaughterandmay.com/news-and-recent-work/recent-... 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 11y ago
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?

noisy_boy 11y ago

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 11y ago
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

cookiecaper 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

stretchwithme 11y ago

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

justinsingh 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.

morgante 11y ago

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/

jbhatab 11y ago
Why isn't what you described possible with AI?
- morgante 11y ago
  The high-level work? Let me first say that I don't think we will have human-level AGI by 2030. If we somehow do, all bets are off. The high-level work requires a large amount of creativity in developing nuanced strategies for a particular domain. It also involves integrating knowledge and ideas from a lot more than the law. Consider that the vast majority of intelligent humans who attempt to make it to partner don't make it. Top lawyers are highly skilled, and automating them away is not trivial. Also consider the trust factor. We've done some customer discovery in this space and most people would just not be comfortable working directly with an AI. This is especially true because a good portion of what partners are doing is human contact work with clients, courts, and opposing counsel. There's a lot of leverage which comes from being able to read and manipulate people which AI can't replicate easily. Note that I'm referring to the 2030 date specifically for this. I don't think lawyers (or, really, any current profession) will exist in 2100.

danso 11y ago

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 11y ago
The costs have remained largely static or even growing slightly because the volume of documents is increasing faster than automation is driving down costs.
harry-wood 11y ago
That last paragraph is pretty much a description of google search is it not? That's what struck me about this article. It's describing AI as a thing which is coming in the future, but... knowledge mining document discovery tasks? The future is now! Google's AI (combined with the vast corpus of linked knowledge on the open web) is presumably already doing away with the need for a lot of low-level legal enquiries which would have previously been handled by law firms. I notice this article touches on the topic: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/22/opinions/barton-rise-and-fall-of-lawyers/ http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/22/opinions/barton-rise-and-f... "Nonprofits and government entities have put almost all of the raw materials of American law online and Google and other search engines have made that law easier to find than ever. An American with a smart phone now has more access to legal sources than most lawyers or judges did fifteen years ago." When stuff is made available on the open web for google (and other search engines) to index, that is the AI revolution right there. I say bring it on. Laws and court proceedings should be treated as public property. It should be put on the open web, permalinkable, annotatable, preferably with an explicit open license, so we can all benefit

arikrak 11y ago

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

genericresponse 11y ago
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.
teambob 11y ago
That's not really true. Back in the 1980s most small and medium businesses still used paper based journals. All the people who were employed to do that are gone - one person now can do the job of about 6 people in the 1980s. Before the 1980s you had to do everything by post, not even fax. So you needed to follow up a lot more and talk a lot more on the phone. Better technology doesn't necessarily mean that people will be "replaced" but it generally has meant that fewer people can do the same job.

fiatmoney 11y ago

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.

teambob 11y ago

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

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stan_rogers 11y ago
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.

rayiner 11y ago

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.

vorg 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

thegasman 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

yk 11y ago

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.)

dinkumthinkum 11y ago

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.

mheiler 11y ago

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.

sandworm101 11y ago

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.)

uvesten 11y ago

Wohoo!

melted 11y ago

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

ruairidhwm 11y ago

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.

acd 11y ago

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/

ZoeZoeBee 11y ago

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

xbmcuser 11y ago

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.