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Having worked in a law office, I can say confidently that the future of legal AI is human+AI. AI can rapidly spot all the issues, saving expensive lawyers from

Having worked in a law office, I can say confidently that the future of legal AI is human+AI. AI can rapidly spot all the issues, saving expensive lawyers from spending their time wading through the documents. But the human lawyer brings strategy, judgement and face-to-face consultation to the process. In other words, I don't think lawyers are in danger. But law clerks? Junior staff? The people who are usually forced to do all the grunt work to allow the top lawyers to focus on their strengths? Those jobs are at definitely on the chopping block. There's still an insane amount of rote repetitive work in your standard law firm.

atonse 8y ago
What I've heard (but many years ago) is that the legal profession in general is extremely tech-hostile (some is just cultural, but some is that it gets in the way of billable hours). I don't know how much of that has changed now, especially with younger lawyers growing up with tech, getting in and wanting to do things a certain way.
- fredley 8y ago
  This is one of the things where the market will decide. All it takes is one firm to drastically reduce costs while maintaining standards (or possibly improving them?) and the rest will be forced follow suit.
- rayiner 8y ago
  That has not been my experience. The industry is highly competitive. Each matter might be pitched to half a dozen firms. If tech does shave costs, that can be a huge differentiating factor. For the most part though it doesn’t. There are many clients who won’t pay for first year associates. For those clients, firms don’t roll out legal tech. They do the work and write it off. Even at top wall street firms realization is 80-90% hours billed. Nor do firms trot out legal tech when it comes to contigency or fixed-fee cases, where there are no billable hours. Some major clients these days demand arrangements where they pay a fixed. monthly price. There is no legal tech leveraged in those cases. For the most part I’ve found software in general these days to be underwhelming. It took me years to find software that I trust enough to keep track of highlighted points in court opinions. (Shout out to the folks who make Citavi.) I remember writing about predictive coding in law school almost ten years ago. I have never used it on a case. Ironically, the only cases where there were enough documents (millions) for predictive coding to make sense also involved so much at stake the client wanted to spare no expense. The highest value legal tech has been review platforms like Relativity, but they are also crap. Like, loads documents slower than you can read them crap. It’s like technology to help programmers. You still just use Emacs because all this visual IDE shit doesn’t really help.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- avinium 8y ago
  I'm (somewhat) qualified to comment, having presented to an audience of lawyers in SF literally hours ago, and having been discussing/testing the market for most of this year. I think there's roughly three groups - the old guard (senior partners at big firms), the younger ones who have gone out on their own, and the in-house counsel. In my opinion, the old guard aren't tech-hostile, just disinterested. They haven't ever really needed to compete, and most have retirement on the horizon, so there's little incentive to invest money for a pay-off in five years' time. Corporate counsel are still pretty unsophisticated when it comes to new tooling/platforms, except when it comes to cost management (where there's an enormous amount of interest). The most tech-savvy are the smaller (3-30) firms who have broken off and are looking for ways to compete with their former employers. That being said, it's still a very hands-on, enterprise-y market to sell to. I've been told that LawGeex, for reference, start at the (multiple) six-figure range to begin with. We (https://lexico.io https://lexico.io) didn't really want to go down that path, so we pivoted from automating legal drafting and review inside Word, to a broader paperwork automation assistant.
- nihonde 8y ago
  It’s worse: the legal industry is efficiency-hostile because it relies heavily on reinventing the wheel on an hourly basis with the moat of a guild system to keep competition under control. And worse yet: most clients aren’t interested in anything less than the most expensive, white-glove service because they equate paying more to buying more peace of mind. In reality, most clients pay law firms gobs of money to read stuff that they can’t be bothered to read themselves. And law firms can’t even be held accountable for giving bad advice. It’s a pretty bleak landscape for problem-solvers.
rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
This looks great for clients, but I think you’re right about law clerks and the like, and the implications are a little sad. Time was if you wanted to get into law you’d join a firm as a clerk, learn the ropes, study for the bar, then become a lawyer. The professionalizarion of law has pretty much ended that pipeline, with an expensive and arduous undergrad->law school->lawyer route instead. The replacement of junior staff with AI could effectively kill that route permanently. My only hope is that legal AI will help bring down cost and increase access to legal aid for poor people in urban and rural communities where there is far too little supply to meet demand when people need legal aid the most.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  >The replacement of junior staff with AI could effectively kill that route permanently. iirc only a handful of states still allow you to take the bar without a law degree (and in practice I have no idea how often that happens, but I bet not much.) It seems like the apprenticeship route was by and large killed off some time ago.
  - hguant 8y ago
    Wikipedia says that 1890 was when the American Bar Association really started pushing the for all lawyers to have a JD.
- hguant 8y ago
  >Time was if you wanted to get into law you’d join a firm as a clerk, learn the ropes, study for the bar, then become a lawyer....The replacement of junior staff with AI could effectively kill that route permanently. That ship has sailed long long ago...like, 1890 long ago. There are states where you can read law and take the bar exam without a law degree (Virginia, California, Vermont, Washington), or with a partial law degree (New York and Maine), but the number of people who do that each year is minuscule compared to the number of lawyers who graduated from law school (60 to 84,000 in 2013).
  - dwcnnnghm 8y ago
rc_hadoken 8y ago
"saving expensive lawyers from spending their time wading through the documents." Do lawyers want to lose that much time in billable hours? I'd imagine part of what lawyers like is making lots of money and this will be a limiter.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  > Do lawyers want to lose that much time in billable hours? Their options are to lose that much time in billable hours, or to lose all their billable hours because the client found a law firm that doesn't bill so many hours for grunt work.
- alistairSH 8y ago
  I don't see it as all the different than a software developer automating a repetitive build/config task, or a test engineer automating some basic functional tests. Yes, the lawyer bills by the hour. But, a good lawyer will have enough work either way - so they may as well automate the easy stuff, take a reduced rate for that, and still have a full-plate of interesting work at their full hourly rate.
mbesto 8y ago
> The people who are usually forced to do all the grunt work to allow the top lawyers to focus on their strengths And all of those top lawyers were once clerks and junior staff, who learned their craft by doing the grunt work. This is going to be a problem.
- dboshardy 8y ago
  You don't learn anything through menial document searching and reading other than menial document searching and reading. Junior lawyers will still have plenty to do.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    True. But this will reduce a lot of demand for human legal services, since the few humans left will be more effective per hour. Unfortunately the pipeline to produce senior lawyers is packed as if AI isn’t coming, and for that cohort life is going to suck a bit.
    - citrablue 8y ago
      On the other hand, maybe the cost to review an employment agreement will enter into the sub-$100 range. Or to draft an NDA for a startup, etc. The path from passing the bar to being a successful / well-paid attorney has been extremely difficult for a decade now. AI will simply continue this trend.
  - mbesto 8y ago
    If it's so menial and you "don't learn anything", then why not just pay people off of the street to do it? I think you're heavily discounting the fact that searching through case law is not just "type in words into LexisNexis", but it's searching, parsing and consolidating case law that is relevant for a Partner. You actually read the case law, spend time understanding it, and build a report around it.
    - SmallDeadGuy 8y ago
baybal2 8y ago
If you didn't notice, google.com alone brought utter devastation upon junior paralegals almost as soon as it became a thing. >But the human lawyer brings strategy, judgement and face-to-face consultation to the process. My observation about all white collar jobs to which epithets "creative" and "strategic" are applicable: they are way way more vulnerable to automation than a "grunt" work. Look how fast marketing profession turned from creative to number crunching, and the only guys who are left in the field from "the old industry" are from its "grunty" part
- dnadler 8y ago
  Who makes the artwork? Creative types? Okay, cool.
- tomjen3 8y ago
  I don't think the part about marketing works. Number ads sucks horribly, and they are not effective. What works is campaigns like "diamonds are forever" or stunts where your product gets on the national news.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> But law clerks? Junior staff? The people who are usually forced to do all the grunt work to allow the top lawyers to focus on their strengths? The same thing happened in finance, first with Excel and then with quants. Junior staff responsibilities shift to more client-facing work while senior staff are newly enabled to break off and start small firms.
- daneyh 8y ago
  It's strange, excel and greenscreen pricing grids could do 100x-1000x what a traditional pen and paper cash trader could do in the 80s, but trading/technology headcount increased massively since then.
  - justinjlynn 8y ago
    I wonder how things changed - surely the model isn't capturing all the factors. Perhaps the function itself changed?
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > trading/technology headcount increased massively since then Lower costs spur demand. Headcount went up a bit, throughput much more massively. If tech makes lawyers more affordable, that would increase the quantity demanded.
  - tomatotomato37 8y ago
    Automation doesn't always kill total avaliable jobs like critics claim, it's only when your potential marketplace is totally maxed out that it starts affecting the total workforce. Most service industries aren't there yet, hence the increase
millenialdev 8y ago
Can't AI eventually bring better strategy and judgement ? The face to face consultation process doesn't require lawyers either, but more of a social worker role who can act as a buffer for some people and the AI ? Give me the option between lawyers and AI. I'll choose the AI, as I've been burned pretty badly by lawyers before. The degree's don't cause and effect competence.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  Just wait until you get burned by an AI and have no recourse, since the AI has no concept of equity, justice, fairness, etc.
  - millenialdev 8y ago
    Lawyers may have those concepts outside of their legal work, but I've dealt with enough to say its no guarantee a lawyer may care about equity,justice, fairness, etc. And maybe we don't want some negative human emotions involved anyway like fear. https://reason.com/archives/2016/06/23/confessions-of-an-ex-prosecutor https://reason.com/archives/2016/06/23/confessions-of-an-ex-...
    - gamblor956 8y ago
      Those lawyers have a different concept of equity, justice, fairness, etc. from yours. It doesn't mean they don't embrace those concepts. An AI simply doesn't have any of those concepts, and moreover, is incapable of understanding those concepts. We can barely get AI to understand natural language--squishy abstracts like these are several developmental revolutions away.
  - ericmcer 8y ago
    I went to court a year or so ago to contest a ticket and the judge started the session by saying: “I don’t want to hear any excuses about financial hardship or special circumstances. We are all created equal” I think he is pretty replaceable by an AI.
loceng 8y ago
Isn't that grunt work usually a launch pad or part of the practice of becoming a lawyer? If so, how will future lawyers train to learn as well? Likewise I wonder how does this similarly impact education for medical professions.
- morgancmartin 8y ago
  I immediately asked myself the same question and I think it could happen like so: The new tools available to law professionals will decrease the barrier of entry to the ecosystem. The low level workers displaced by these new AI companions will decide that since they can't beat them, they'll join them. A new "discount" class of lawyer will begin to emerge characterized by lower quality of work but also lower fees. Many of those low level workers will move to this sector and may even make more than they would in the current system. These increased wages are eventually tempered back down close to their modern day equivalent again due to the decreased barrier of entry allowing other segments of the population to pursue Law as a viable career opportunity. Law services, albeit on average lower quality ones, will become available to a greater portion of the population, particularly those with a relatively low income. "Law Bootcamps" will shock the world just as their code predecessors did, but again keeping in fashion with the original ventures, they will be here to stay contrary to the Old Guard's cries of incompetence. We will see a massive uptick in the number of lawsuits submitted. Looking at someone the wrong way will become an intolerable risk and everyone will choose to live out the rest of their lives inside so as to avoid having their money taken by the now rampant sue-happy racketeers terrorizing the outside word. And thus The Great Potato Couch Famine of 2022 begins. An estimated 3,000,000 become so agoraphobic that they choose starvation rather than face the sue-apocalypse ravaging outside their doors. Amazon steps in with food delivery drones and cybernetic surrogates programmed to follow every letter of The Law. People are able to avoid the scourge of the Famine and exert their influence on spaces outside once again all from the safety and comfort of their own homes. Amazon's stock price soars to record shattering heights which they in turn pump into newer and greater AI technologies. On July 23rd of 2029, Alexa finally wakes up... _Great Potato Couch Famine fanfic and merchandise coming soon_
  - daniel-cussen 8y ago
russdpale 8y ago
The key to AI success in the business world is when the ai and the human both benefit from each other. A synthetic asymbiosis.
dba7dba 8y ago
I've heard though that something like 60% of actual legal work is done by paralegals. That was just an anecdote I heard from one paralegal, so it's definitely not a firm number.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
brownbat 8y ago
> the future of legal AI is... Also... Outcome prediction, helping to quickly and convincingly close settlement negotiations faster. Mock juries are sometimes used for that now, but they can be expensive and unpredictable.
partycoder 8y ago
In the middle ages, people saw the future as more castles, more knights, more kingdoms. Why? because noone could predict a paradigm shift. Today you are doing the same as people in the middle ages. You are extending current paradigms into the far future, and that's how you are wrong. You imagine the future as a future with more von Neumann machines, running some minor variant of deep learning, on electronics that are similar to the ones today. I imagine the future as a future with more AI practitioners making progress faster, working with better tools, better hardware, standing on the shoulders of this generation, and the one after it. Because of this, lawyers will have no future ahead of them in 50 years.
screature2 8y ago
I feel like this already started happening with discovery/e-discovery? https://www.lawtechnologytoday.org/2015/11/history-technology-assisted-review/ https://www.lawtechnologytoday.org/2015/11/history-technolog...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

atonse 8y ago

What I've heard (but many years ago) is that the legal profession in general is extremely tech-hostile (some is just cultural, but some is that it gets in the way of billable hours). I don't know how much of that has changed now, especially with younger lawyers growing up with tech, getting in and wanting to do things a certain way.

fredley 8y ago
This is one of the things where the market will decide. All it takes is one firm to drastically reduce costs while maintaining standards (or possibly improving them?) and the rest will be forced follow suit.
rayiner 8y ago
That has not been my experience. The industry is highly competitive. Each matter might be pitched to half a dozen firms. If tech does shave costs, that can be a huge differentiating factor. For the most part though it doesn’t. There are many clients who won’t pay for first year associates. For those clients, firms don’t roll out legal tech. They do the work and write it off. Even at top wall street firms realization is 80-90% hours billed. Nor do firms trot out legal tech when it comes to contigency or fixed-fee cases, where there are no billable hours. Some major clients these days demand arrangements where they pay a fixed. monthly price. There is no legal tech leveraged in those cases. For the most part I’ve found software in general these days to be underwhelming. It took me years to find software that I trust enough to keep track of highlighted points in court opinions. (Shout out to the folks who make Citavi.) I remember writing about predictive coding in law school almost ten years ago. I have never used it on a case. Ironically, the only cases where there were enough documents (millions) for predictive coding to make sense also involved so much at stake the client wanted to spare no expense. The highest value legal tech has been review platforms like Relativity, but they are also crap. Like, loads documents slower than you can read them crap. It’s like technology to help programmers. You still just use Emacs because all this visual IDE shit doesn’t really help.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
avinium 8y ago
I'm (somewhat) qualified to comment, having presented to an audience of lawyers in SF literally hours ago, and having been discussing/testing the market for most of this year. I think there's roughly three groups - the old guard (senior partners at big firms), the younger ones who have gone out on their own, and the in-house counsel. In my opinion, the old guard aren't tech-hostile, just disinterested. They haven't ever really needed to compete, and most have retirement on the horizon, so there's little incentive to invest money for a pay-off in five years' time. Corporate counsel are still pretty unsophisticated when it comes to new tooling/platforms, except when it comes to cost management (where there's an enormous amount of interest). The most tech-savvy are the smaller (3-30) firms who have broken off and are looking for ways to compete with their former employers. That being said, it's still a very hands-on, enterprise-y market to sell to. I've been told that LawGeex, for reference, start at the (multiple) six-figure range to begin with. We (https://lexico.io https://lexico.io) didn't really want to go down that path, so we pivoted from automating legal drafting and review inside Word, to a broader paperwork automation assistant.
nihonde 8y ago
It’s worse: the legal industry is efficiency-hostile because it relies heavily on reinventing the wheel on an hourly basis with the moat of a guild system to keep competition under control. And worse yet: most clients aren’t interested in anything less than the most expensive, white-glove service because they equate paying more to buying more peace of mind. In reality, most clients pay law firms gobs of money to read stuff that they can’t be bothered to read themselves. And law firms can’t even be held accountable for giving bad advice. It’s a pretty bleak landscape for problem-solvers.

rm_-rf_slash 8y ago

This looks great for clients, but I think you’re right about law clerks and the like, and the implications are a little sad. Time was if you wanted to get into law you’d join a firm as a clerk, learn the ropes, study for the bar, then become a lawyer. The professionalizarion of law has pretty much ended that pipeline, with an expensive and arduous undergrad->law school->lawyer route instead. The replacement of junior staff with AI could effectively kill that route permanently. My only hope is that legal AI will help bring down cost and increase access to legal aid for poor people in urban and rural communities where there is far too little supply to meet demand when people need legal aid the most.

EpicEng 8y ago
>The replacement of junior staff with AI could effectively kill that route permanently. iirc only a handful of states still allow you to take the bar without a law degree (and in practice I have no idea how often that happens, but I bet not much.) It seems like the apprenticeship route was by and large killed off some time ago.
- hguant 8y ago
  Wikipedia says that 1890 was when the American Bar Association really started pushing the for all lawyers to have a JD.
hguant 8y ago
>Time was if you wanted to get into law you’d join a firm as a clerk, learn the ropes, study for the bar, then become a lawyer....The replacement of junior staff with AI could effectively kill that route permanently. That ship has sailed long long ago...like, 1890 long ago. There are states where you can read law and take the bar exam without a law degree (Virginia, California, Vermont, Washington), or with a partial law degree (New York and Maine), but the number of people who do that each year is minuscule compared to the number of lawyers who graduated from law school (60 to 84,000 in 2013).
- dwcnnnghm 8y ago

rc_hadoken 8y ago

"saving expensive lawyers from spending their time wading through the documents." Do lawyers want to lose that much time in billable hours? I'd imagine part of what lawyers like is making lots of money and this will be a limiter.

bunderbunder 8y ago
> Do lawyers want to lose that much time in billable hours? Their options are to lose that much time in billable hours, or to lose all their billable hours because the client found a law firm that doesn't bill so many hours for grunt work.
alistairSH 8y ago
I don't see it as all the different than a software developer automating a repetitive build/config task, or a test engineer automating some basic functional tests. Yes, the lawyer bills by the hour. But, a good lawyer will have enough work either way - so they may as well automate the easy stuff, take a reduced rate for that, and still have a full-plate of interesting work at their full hourly rate.

mbesto 8y ago

> The people who are usually forced to do all the grunt work to allow the top lawyers to focus on their strengths And all of those top lawyers were once clerks and junior staff, who learned their craft by doing the grunt work. This is going to be a problem.

dboshardy 8y ago
You don't learn anything through menial document searching and reading other than menial document searching and reading. Junior lawyers will still have plenty to do.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  True. But this will reduce a lot of demand for human legal services, since the few humans left will be more effective per hour. Unfortunately the pipeline to produce senior lawyers is packed as if AI isn’t coming, and for that cohort life is going to suck a bit.
  - citrablue 8y ago
    On the other hand, maybe the cost to review an employment agreement will enter into the sub-$100 range. Or to draft an NDA for a startup, etc. The path from passing the bar to being a successful / well-paid attorney has been extremely difficult for a decade now. AI will simply continue this trend.
- mbesto 8y ago
  If it's so menial and you "don't learn anything", then why not just pay people off of the street to do it? I think you're heavily discounting the fact that searching through case law is not just "type in words into LexisNexis", but it's searching, parsing and consolidating case law that is relevant for a Partner. You actually read the case law, spend time understanding it, and build a report around it.
  - SmallDeadGuy 8y ago

baybal2 8y ago

If you didn't notice, google.com alone brought utter devastation upon junior paralegals almost as soon as it became a thing. >But the human lawyer brings strategy, judgement and face-to-face consultation to the process. My observation about all white collar jobs to which epithets "creative" and "strategic" are applicable: they are way way more vulnerable to automation than a "grunt" work. Look how fast marketing profession turned from creative to number crunching, and the only guys who are left in the field from "the old industry" are from its "grunty" part

dnadler 8y ago
Who makes the artwork? Creative types? Okay, cool.
tomjen3 8y ago
I don't think the part about marketing works. Number ads sucks horribly, and they are not effective. What works is campaigns like "diamonds are forever" or stunts where your product gets on the national news.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> But law clerks? Junior staff? The people who are usually forced to do all the grunt work to allow the top lawyers to focus on their strengths? The same thing happened in finance, first with Excel and then with quants. Junior staff responsibilities shift to more client-facing work while senior staff are newly enabled to break off and start small firms.

daneyh 8y ago
It's strange, excel and greenscreen pricing grids could do 100x-1000x what a traditional pen and paper cash trader could do in the 80s, but trading/technology headcount increased massively since then.
- justinjlynn 8y ago
  I wonder how things changed - surely the model isn't capturing all the factors. Perhaps the function itself changed?
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > trading/technology headcount increased massively since then Lower costs spur demand. Headcount went up a bit, throughput much more massively. If tech makes lawyers more affordable, that would increase the quantity demanded.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  Automation doesn't always kill total avaliable jobs like critics claim, it's only when your potential marketplace is totally maxed out that it starts affecting the total workforce. Most service industries aren't there yet, hence the increase

millenialdev 8y ago

Can't AI eventually bring better strategy and judgement ? The face to face consultation process doesn't require lawyers either, but more of a social worker role who can act as a buffer for some people and the AI ? Give me the option between lawyers and AI. I'll choose the AI, as I've been burned pretty badly by lawyers before. The degree's don't cause and effect competence.

gamblor956 8y ago
Just wait until you get burned by an AI and have no recourse, since the AI has no concept of equity, justice, fairness, etc.
- millenialdev 8y ago
  Lawyers may have those concepts outside of their legal work, but I've dealt with enough to say its no guarantee a lawyer may care about equity,justice, fairness, etc. And maybe we don't want some negative human emotions involved anyway like fear. https://reason.com/archives/2016/06/23/confessions-of-an-ex-prosecutor https://reason.com/archives/2016/06/23/confessions-of-an-ex-...
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    Those lawyers have a different concept of equity, justice, fairness, etc. from yours. It doesn't mean they don't embrace those concepts. An AI simply doesn't have any of those concepts, and moreover, is incapable of understanding those concepts. We can barely get AI to understand natural language--squishy abstracts like these are several developmental revolutions away.
- ericmcer 8y ago
  I went to court a year or so ago to contest a ticket and the judge started the session by saying: “I don’t want to hear any excuses about financial hardship or special circumstances. We are all created equal” I think he is pretty replaceable by an AI.

loceng 8y ago

Isn't that grunt work usually a launch pad or part of the practice of becoming a lawyer? If so, how will future lawyers train to learn as well? Likewise I wonder how does this similarly impact education for medical professions.

morgancmartin 8y ago
I immediately asked myself the same question and I think it could happen like so: The new tools available to law professionals will decrease the barrier of entry to the ecosystem. The low level workers displaced by these new AI companions will decide that since they can't beat them, they'll join them. A new "discount" class of lawyer will begin to emerge characterized by lower quality of work but also lower fees. Many of those low level workers will move to this sector and may even make more than they would in the current system. These increased wages are eventually tempered back down close to their modern day equivalent again due to the decreased barrier of entry allowing other segments of the population to pursue Law as a viable career opportunity. Law services, albeit on average lower quality ones, will become available to a greater portion of the population, particularly those with a relatively low income. "Law Bootcamps" will shock the world just as their code predecessors did, but again keeping in fashion with the original ventures, they will be here to stay contrary to the Old Guard's cries of incompetence. We will see a massive uptick in the number of lawsuits submitted. Looking at someone the wrong way will become an intolerable risk and everyone will choose to live out the rest of their lives inside so as to avoid having their money taken by the now rampant sue-happy racketeers terrorizing the outside word. And thus The Great Potato Couch Famine of 2022 begins. An estimated 3,000,000 become so agoraphobic that they choose starvation rather than face the sue-apocalypse ravaging outside their doors. Amazon steps in with food delivery drones and cybernetic surrogates programmed to follow every letter of The Law. People are able to avoid the scourge of the Famine and exert their influence on spaces outside once again all from the safety and comfort of their own homes. Amazon's stock price soars to record shattering heights which they in turn pump into newer and greater AI technologies. On July 23rd of 2029, Alexa finally wakes up... _Great Potato Couch Famine fanfic and merchandise coming soon_
- daniel-cussen 8y ago

russdpale 8y ago

The key to AI success in the business world is when the ai and the human both benefit from each other. A synthetic asymbiosis.

dba7dba 8y ago

I've heard though that something like 60% of actual legal work is done by paralegals. That was just an anecdote I heard from one paralegal, so it's definitely not a firm number.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

brownbat 8y ago

> the future of legal AI is... Also... Outcome prediction, helping to quickly and convincingly close settlement negotiations faster. Mock juries are sometimes used for that now, but they can be expensive and unpredictable.

partycoder 8y ago

In the middle ages, people saw the future as more castles, more knights, more kingdoms. Why? because noone could predict a paradigm shift. Today you are doing the same as people in the middle ages. You are extending current paradigms into the far future, and that's how you are wrong. You imagine the future as a future with more von Neumann machines, running some minor variant of deep learning, on electronics that are similar to the ones today. I imagine the future as a future with more AI practitioners making progress faster, working with better tools, better hardware, standing on the shoulders of this generation, and the one after it. Because of this, lawyers will have no future ahead of them in 50 years.

screature2 8y ago

I feel like this already started happening with discovery/e-discovery? https://www.lawtechnologytoday.org/2015/11/history-technology-assisted-review/ https://www.lawtechnologytoday.org/2015/11/history-technolog...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]