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That was such a frustrating article. I kept reading anecdote after anecdote hoping to find out why the American economy needs fewer lawyers than it used to. The

by guelo 10y ago

That was such a frustrating article. I kept reading anecdote after anecdote hoping to find out why the American economy needs fewer lawyers than it used to. They never explained it. Is it a software automation thing?

hibikir 10y ago
At least a good part of it is. Looking for relevant jurisprudence, for instance, has gotten much easier. First everything was digitized, and in the 2000s better search engine tech got much better. What used to take a whole lot of experience, or many hours of search, now can take minutes. Similar things happen with the output of discovery: Before you'd have to pay people to read through every single document, make notes on what they contain, cull what is interesting... It was a huge amount of labor that nowadays computers can do. There are other fun advancements in the horizon: When computers start to gain some understanding of documents, they can read them for us, saving even more time. Eventually helping a non-lawyer understand a contract, and even provide basic advice, all automatically, becomes possible. There are other factors to the decline of our need of lawyers, but they are cyclical, and will perk up again. The technology changes are here to stay though.
nikanj 10y ago
Say we need three times more lawyers than we did in the 80s, but are graduating ten times more. This can lead to a lawyer glut even when we need more lawyers than ever. It also leads to people feeling like lawyers are no longer "in need", as there's plenty of competent ones available.
damon_c 10y ago
Speaking only from second hand anecdotal sources... I know that 10 years ago, the primary occupation of 1st year associates at large law firms was searching through boxes and boxes of case history for relevant citations. That has to be done instantly with a search engine now and therefore requires far fewer 150k/year 1st year associates.
- sbardle 10y ago
  I know a few people who still do "box moving jobs", and who are on good pay. But like you point out, I can't see it lasting.
punctilio 10y ago
A lot of what's been going on at the higher end of the legal services industry is greater cost control by clients. Expensive, elite law firms had a long run in which they were able to justify heavy pyramid-like staffing of matters based on a pure billable hour model. Those days are basically over (though major litigation work has probably changed the least in this respect). That change has had some effects on the amount of hiring done by the elite firms and also has had some effect on salary structure. Pressure at the more elite end of the profession has ripple effects downward to the less elite end. One paragraph in the article gets at what's been happening: "With big-firm jobs drying up, however, many of these graduates began competing for lower-paying spots at midsize firms, which also downsized, and certain government jobs they wouldn’t have sought in an earlier era." I don't quite think of it as the American economy actually needing fewer lawyers than it used to. Rather, for a period of maybe a couple of decades (I think beginning with the 1980s business boom, so roughly 1985-2005) the biggest law firms enjoyed unusual success with the business model I refer to above. I think we're seeing a kind of correction where the legal profession is starting to look more like it was before the 1980s. In some ways I think there may be more interesting opportunities for lawyers now. I see a lot of lawyers with a few years' experience establishing solo or boutique-firm practices in specialized areas that I don't think would have been as viable a couple of decades ago. Someone commented that you should only go to law school if you go to 'Harvard or Yale', but I am not sure that is what I'd take from recent developments. However, if your goal is to get a job in a big elite firm after graduating from law school, opportunities for those who didn't go to one of the top national schools (not limited to Harvard and Yale of course) are no doubt more reduced than 10 or 20 years ago.
yourapostasy 10y ago
Software automation is purely responsible for the automation of a legal sub-industry: discovery. The most common interchange format for paperwork is TIFF scans and actual paper. A significant cost in litigation work was paying a small army of associate lawyers to manually read through this mountain of paperwork to find information relevant to the case. OCR got good enough fast enough that within a single generation, this sub-industry went from needing a mass of associate lawyers to a sliver of a fraction of that. Data transmission and global supply chain got good enough fast enough that those pages that fell below a configured confidence scoring on the OCR were sent to offshore teams for a fraction of the cost of the remaining American associate lawyers, for manual clarification. This scenario will play out and repeat itself in many industries. A stunning amount of white collar middle class work today across an astonishing array of industries relies upon fairly basic reading, writing and reasoning skillsets, increasingly more coming within striking range of software advances with each passing decade. I don't think blue collar work is particularly safe from automation, either. We're likely not too far from a lawn maintenance robot that autonomously and continuously maintains every aspect of a simple grass lawn (mowing, edging, ant hill removal, insect control, fertilization, weed removal, soil aeration). From there, we only have decades before more general-case, sophisticated, consumer-grade, reliable set-and-forget lawn maintenance robots arrive on the scene. I suspect we won't see industries entirely shrivel, I think what is happening is a lot of industries are relying upon relatively routine and repetitive work to support a plurality or even the bulk of their sustaining revenue, while expert-level work boosts their margins. Automation seems to be revealing cost structures of the routine, repetitive work, and re-pricing the expert-level work. The experts will still be paid a lot, possibly even much more than they are now per unit sale (whether per hour, client, incident, etc.), but the volume of their work will decline, while the lower-skill work is decimated to working wage levels.
- chii 10y ago
  this video effectively explains your point very succintly and well! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
- rhino369 10y ago
  Automation also caused the e-discovery field to explode In the first place. There was a brief period after explosion of email where e-discovery got huge. Before email people would mostly talk in person or on the phone. People had to review documents but it was hundreds or documents or thousands. But after email, word processing, etc, now there were tens of thousands or maybe even millions of files to search. Digital offices great many many many more files than pre digital offices. OCR also just made the industry bigger. Because you could just ask for any email the company had that had specific key words. Sounds more efficient right? Wrong. The number of false positives is insane. Before OCR, judges would never make you read through every email in a company. Machine learning (called predictive coding in the legal industry) is taking some jobs. But I've heard you need half a million documents to train the program. But you still need someone to do a second level review. It's incredibly useful but only on huge projects. The bigger reason for job losses is that contractors now operate overseas. Indian document reviewers are cheap. I bet the discovery industry is still probably 5x bigger than it was in 1980.

by guelo 10y ago

hibikir 10y ago

At least a good part of it is. Looking for relevant jurisprudence, for instance, has gotten much easier. First everything was digitized, and in the 2000s better search engine tech got much better. What used to take a whole lot of experience, or many hours of search, now can take minutes. Similar things happen with the output of discovery: Before you'd have to pay people to read through every single document, make notes on what they contain, cull what is interesting... It was a huge amount of labor that nowadays computers can do. There are other fun advancements in the horizon: When computers start to gain some understanding of documents, they can read them for us, saving even more time. Eventually helping a non-lawyer understand a contract, and even provide basic advice, all automatically, becomes possible. There are other factors to the decline of our need of lawyers, but they are cyclical, and will perk up again. The technology changes are here to stay though.

nikanj 10y ago

Say we need three times more lawyers than we did in the 80s, but are graduating ten times more. This can lead to a lawyer glut even when we need more lawyers than ever. It also leads to people feeling like lawyers are no longer "in need", as there's plenty of competent ones available.

damon_c 10y ago

Speaking only from second hand anecdotal sources... I know that 10 years ago, the primary occupation of 1st year associates at large law firms was searching through boxes and boxes of case history for relevant citations. That has to be done instantly with a search engine now and therefore requires far fewer 150k/year 1st year associates.

sbardle 10y ago
I know a few people who still do "box moving jobs", and who are on good pay. But like you point out, I can't see it lasting.

punctilio 10y ago

A lot of what's been going on at the higher end of the legal services industry is greater cost control by clients. Expensive, elite law firms had a long run in which they were able to justify heavy pyramid-like staffing of matters based on a pure billable hour model. Those days are basically over (though major litigation work has probably changed the least in this respect). That change has had some effects on the amount of hiring done by the elite firms and also has had some effect on salary structure. Pressure at the more elite end of the profession has ripple effects downward to the less elite end. One paragraph in the article gets at what's been happening: "With big-firm jobs drying up, however, many of these graduates began competing for lower-paying spots at midsize firms, which also downsized, and certain government jobs they wouldn’t have sought in an earlier era." I don't quite think of it as the American economy actually needing fewer lawyers than it used to. Rather, for a period of maybe a couple of decades (I think beginning with the 1980s business boom, so roughly 1985-2005) the biggest law firms enjoyed unusual success with the business model I refer to above. I think we're seeing a kind of correction where the legal profession is starting to look more like it was before the 1980s. In some ways I think there may be more interesting opportunities for lawyers now. I see a lot of lawyers with a few years' experience establishing solo or boutique-firm practices in specialized areas that I don't think would have been as viable a couple of decades ago. Someone commented that you should only go to law school if you go to 'Harvard or Yale', but I am not sure that is what I'd take from recent developments. However, if your goal is to get a job in a big elite firm after graduating from law school, opportunities for those who didn't go to one of the top national schools (not limited to Harvard and Yale of course) are no doubt more reduced than 10 or 20 years ago.

yourapostasy 10y ago

Software automation is purely responsible for the automation of a legal sub-industry: discovery. The most common interchange format for paperwork is TIFF scans and actual paper. A significant cost in litigation work was paying a small army of associate lawyers to manually read through this mountain of paperwork to find information relevant to the case. OCR got good enough fast enough that within a single generation, this sub-industry went from needing a mass of associate lawyers to a sliver of a fraction of that. Data transmission and global supply chain got good enough fast enough that those pages that fell below a configured confidence scoring on the OCR were sent to offshore teams for a fraction of the cost of the remaining American associate lawyers, for manual clarification. This scenario will play out and repeat itself in many industries. A stunning amount of white collar middle class work today across an astonishing array of industries relies upon fairly basic reading, writing and reasoning skillsets, increasingly more coming within striking range of software advances with each passing decade. I don't think blue collar work is particularly safe from automation, either. We're likely not too far from a lawn maintenance robot that autonomously and continuously maintains every aspect of a simple grass lawn (mowing, edging, ant hill removal, insect control, fertilization, weed removal, soil aeration). From there, we only have decades before more general-case, sophisticated, consumer-grade, reliable set-and-forget lawn maintenance robots arrive on the scene. I suspect we won't see industries entirely shrivel, I think what is happening is a lot of industries are relying upon relatively routine and repetitive work to support a plurality or even the bulk of their sustaining revenue, while expert-level work boosts their margins. Automation seems to be revealing cost structures of the routine, repetitive work, and re-pricing the expert-level work. The experts will still be paid a lot, possibly even much more than they are now per unit sale (whether per hour, client, incident, etc.), but the volume of their work will decline, while the lower-skill work is decimated to working wage levels.

chii 10y ago
this video effectively explains your point very succintly and well! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
rhino369 10y ago
Automation also caused the e-discovery field to explode In the first place. There was a brief period after explosion of email where e-discovery got huge. Before email people would mostly talk in person or on the phone. People had to review documents but it was hundreds or documents or thousands. But after email, word processing, etc, now there were tens of thousands or maybe even millions of files to search. Digital offices great many many many more files than pre digital offices. OCR also just made the industry bigger. Because you could just ask for any email the company had that had specific key words. Sounds more efficient right? Wrong. The number of false positives is insane. Before OCR, judges would never make you read through every email in a company. Machine learning (called predictive coding in the legal industry) is taking some jobs. But I've heard you need half a million documents to train the program. But you still need someone to do a second level review. It's incredibly useful but only on huge projects. The bigger reason for job losses is that contractors now operate overseas. Indian document reviewers are cheap. I bet the discovery industry is still probably 5x bigger than it was in 1980.