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The true value of a lawyer is their judgement, analysis ability, and their power of persuasion. To replace that you need a true Strong AI. So I expect lawyers

The true value of a lawyer is their judgement, analysis ability, and their power of persuasion. To replace that you need a true Strong AI. So I expect lawyers to be replace shortly after everyone else is replaced. Give or take a few years, since lawyers have some protectionist options, like banning AI from being a lawyer. Weak AI will eat around the edges. Better spelling, grammar, and cite checking software could reduce a lot of billable time. But most associates spend less than 10% of their time doing that. For big litigation, document review has been mostly outsourced to legal service companies. I've been a junior associate (the ones traditionally responsible for reviewing documents) for about 2 year. I think I've billed ~200 hours to that (out ~4,200 hours I've billed total). Client won't pay our rates. So we hire contractors for 25 dollars an hour. There is still room for disruption. Predictive coding will probably become the norm within 15 years. But it's only going to put the temp "doc reviewers" out of job. Westlaw and Lexis already summarize cases, index them. ALJ and Mathew Bender sells practice guides. Firms subscribe to proofreading, document processing, and printing services. They hire paralegals and assistants to do the less taxing work. It's also important to note that business model of firms only relies on associates billing hours because it's convenient. Clients don't pay 500 an hour for an associate to make sure commas are correct because it costs that much to provide. It's just an add on service to get the high level talent's analysis and judgement. Nickle and diming essentially. Associate costs are fairly small portion of current billing rates. Most of the grunt work I do is bespoke. Stuff like comparing one patent to another. We have google patent and questal to search. But it takes a human to do the analysis. Even humans of average intelligence with an engineering degree aren't very good at it. If you can build an AI that does it for any patent you feed in, all of our jobs are fucked.

morgante 11y ago
> The true value of a lawyer is their judgement, analysis ability, and their power of persuasion. I agree. We're not going to be seeing AI replacing lawyers any time soon. That being said, I think you are downplaying the efficiency gains which come from AI and lawyers working together, especially when it comes to bespoke work. For your example, diffing two patents is indeed something which still requires human intelligence. But there are ways of making the process of comparison more efficient by automatically correlating similar claims, providing references inline, etc. This goes beyond the easy wins which come from "better spelling, grammar, and cite checking software" (which are themselves non-negligible).
- rhino369 11y ago
  >providing references inline Me and a few people at were joking that we should leave our firm and write an addon for Chrome that adds cites when you copy and paste from google patent. I would kill for that.
  - rahimnathwani 11y ago
    What exactly would it need to do?
  - berntb 11y ago
    Does MacOS still support multiple format variants of copy/paste? Sounds like a small add on, in that case?
    - mh- 11y ago
      it does, yes. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pbcopy.1.html https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...
  - reitanqild 11y ago
    If you could do away with Chrome you could maybe use IE + OneNote? Cannot say for sure in your case but OneNote is pretty good at linking to where you copied stuff from.
- georgemcbay 11y ago
  Yeah, "this" as they say. People tend to think about job-destruction from AI in terms of when AI can replace everyone doing that job, but the real negative (in terms of job growth) impact comes a long time before that. If AI is good enough to let 1 person do the job 5 used to do, that's already a huge economic impact -- 80% reduction is huge.
jng 11y ago
> Weak AI will eat around the edges. Better spelling, grammar, and cite checking software could reduce a lot of billable time. But most associates spend less than 10% of their time doing that. You must live in a world where NLP software is very advanced. In mine, researchers found it so hard to either produce or understand human language, that most of them switched to playing statistical tricks on images.
iandanforth 11y ago
In general I agree, however in specific the tools you refer to are not well exposed to the general public. The more tasks I can do with confidence and without a lawyer, the better. It's a bit like wordpress. Making a decent website really doesn't take a programmer today. But for a long time the frameworks (like django) were making site builders lives easy without making the projects near-free for end users. The first high quality lawyer replacement service I've used is clerky. I expect more and more startups in that space.

morgante 11y ago

> The true value of a lawyer is their judgement, analysis ability, and their power of persuasion. I agree. We're not going to be seeing AI replacing lawyers any time soon. That being said, I think you are downplaying the efficiency gains which come from AI and lawyers working together, especially when it comes to bespoke work. For your example, diffing two patents is indeed something which still requires human intelligence. But there are ways of making the process of comparison more efficient by automatically correlating similar claims, providing references inline, etc. This goes beyond the easy wins which come from "better spelling, grammar, and cite checking software" (which are themselves non-negligible).

rhino369 11y ago
>providing references inline Me and a few people at were joking that we should leave our firm and write an addon for Chrome that adds cites when you copy and paste from google patent. I would kill for that.
- rahimnathwani 11y ago
  What exactly would it need to do?
- berntb 11y ago
  Does MacOS still support multiple format variants of copy/paste? Sounds like a small add on, in that case?
  - mh- 11y ago
    it does, yes. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pbcopy.1.html https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...
- reitanqild 11y ago
  If you could do away with Chrome you could maybe use IE + OneNote? Cannot say for sure in your case but OneNote is pretty good at linking to where you copied stuff from.
georgemcbay 11y ago
Yeah, "this" as they say. People tend to think about job-destruction from AI in terms of when AI can replace everyone doing that job, but the real negative (in terms of job growth) impact comes a long time before that. If AI is good enough to let 1 person do the job 5 used to do, that's already a huge economic impact -- 80% reduction is huge.

jng 11y ago

> Weak AI will eat around the edges. Better spelling, grammar, and cite checking software could reduce a lot of billable time. But most associates spend less than 10% of their time doing that. You must live in a world where NLP software is very advanced. In mine, researchers found it so hard to either produce or understand human language, that most of them switched to playing statistical tricks on images.

iandanforth 11y ago

In general I agree, however in specific the tools you refer to are not well exposed to the general public. The more tasks I can do with confidence and without a lawyer, the better. It's a bit like wordpress. Making a decent website really doesn't take a programmer today. But for a long time the frameworks (like django) were making site builders lives easy without making the projects near-free for end users. The first high quality lawyer replacement service I've used is clerky. I expect more and more startups in that space.