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Will Advanced AI Spell the End of Lawyers?
HughPickens.com writes: Lawyers have been described as the canaries in the coal mine in the face of a wave of automation now beginning to displace highly skilled white-collar workers as the increasing reliance on so-called "e-discovery" software in lawsuits raises the specter that $35-an-hour paralegals as well as $400-an-hour lawyers could fall victim to programs that could read and analyze legal documents more quickly and accurately than humans. Now John Markoff writes in the NY Times that a new study, "Can Robots Be Lawyers?", by Dana Remus analyzes which aspects of a lawyer's job could be automated and concludes that many of the tasks that lawyers perform fall well within human behavior that cannot be easily codified. "When a task is less structured, as many tasks are," writes Remus, "it will often be impossible to anticipate all possible contingencies."
According to Markoff being a lawyer involves performing a range of tasks including counseling, appearing in court, and persuading juries. Reading documents accounts for a relatively modest portion of a lawyer's activities. Remus estimates that about 13 percent of all legal work might ultimately fall prey to automation. According to Markoff, if that amount of work disappeared in a single year, it would be devastating but implemented over many years, this amount of technological change will be less noticeable. Even in the case of start-ups like LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, two sites that can aid in the preparation of legal documents, the impact of automation will more likely be in expanding into underserved markets rather than in displacing existing legal services.. ""A careful look at existing and emerging technologies reveals that it is only relatively structured and repetitive tasks that can currently be automated," concludes Remus. "These tasks represent a relatively modest percentage of lawyers' billable hours."
According to Markoff being a lawyer involves performing a range of tasks including counseling, appearing in court, and persuading juries. Reading documents accounts for a relatively modest portion of a lawyer's activities. Remus estimates that about 13 percent of all legal work might ultimately fall prey to automation. According to Markoff, if that amount of work disappeared in a single year, it would be devastating but implemented over many years, this amount of technological change will be less noticeable. Even in the case of start-ups like LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, two sites that can aid in the preparation of legal documents, the impact of automation will more likely be in expanding into underserved markets rather than in displacing existing legal services.. ""A careful look at existing and emerging technologies reveals that it is only relatively structured and repetitive tasks that can currently be automated," concludes Remus. "These tasks represent a relatively modest percentage of lawyers' billable hours."
Should lawyers be eliminated? Hell yes, by any means necessary.
Can we do it by simplification, increased transparency and uniformity (from jurisdiction to jurisdiction) of the justice system? Partly.
Can we do it with advanced AI? Partly.
Can we do it with guns? Don't know about the US, but it has worked in other countries.
Great! We could sue people as fast as software can file claims. I smell the Baby Cooper Dollar Bill in the making.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
I see this as being able to almost completely take over discovery/document review (which is done by lawyers the public will never see, probably working from home, on a non-contractual basis).
The whole process will be pretty much transparent to people who aren't in the field, except that becoming a lawyer will be an even shittier career choice for people who can't get into tier one schools - document review is done by people who graduate from lower-end schools.
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Most legal work is prep work. Ie setting up wills and selling and buying stuff, contracts.. Most of this work is repeptive with small changes which can be done with offshore workers who pass the work back to a 'real' lawyer to rubber stamp even without review.. Lawyers don't need to worry about AI they just need to worry about outsourcing. Welcome to IT's world snowflake.
AI's aren't going to replace lawyers in the near term, particularly in discovery - doc production work, but for a different reason.
Why bring in an expensive machine when you can get a swarm of peons for really cheap, and throw them away when you're done?
In most large cities in the country, there are way too many lawyers (yeah, insert favorite joke here), with more being hatched every year. When a big case comes up, or any legal matter requiring a lot of gruntwork, such as going through tons of documents, a lot of law firms hire throw-away lawyers for some times as little as $20 an hour -- and for most of these, they have more folks looking for work than they need. Why would you go with an AI in a situation like that? They're too expensive (at this time), and if the docs are in printed form (which is how the other side will present them to the other side's life as difficult as possible), the docs have to be handled, bates stamped, scanned, and then analyzed. Why not hire a roomful of out of work lawyers $20 an hour to do that, with a few more at a higher rate (say, $30) to do spot check and general QA, eventually feeding to that high priced ($125 an hour) law firm paralegal. And dump them when the task is done.
(Disclosure: I passed the California bar in 1990 and have been through this ratshit. People that save every email they've ever received or sent make a lot of money for law firms handling discovery. Please, don't save all that shit unless it's really needed and useful?)
Slippery slope when you start teaching robots to lie.
The number of laws, regulations and bureacratic systems has grown dramatically over the last 50 years. Why? Because we now have computer automation that enables bureacracies to implement them.
Consider the Tax Office / IRS. It has roughly the same budget (as a proportion of GDP) today as it had in the 1950s, before (electronic) computers. But the laws are much more complex today. Today's laws simply could not have been administered in the 1950s, without computer automation. And the more laws the more lawyers.
In the longer term (50..200 years) computers will be able to really think. At that stage it seems unlikely that they would want people around, let alone lawyers.
See http://www.computersthink.com/
CGP Grey brought up this exact thing (lawyers research work being done by robots) in his excellent video: "Humans Need Not Apply"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
I've been on the receiving end of court cases twice. First time was in '07, I got arrested for something I didn't do. Got a lawyer, he wanted $2500. Ok, I can do that. Then the DA decided to press charges. Lawyer wanted $25k, and said it would be at least $100k if it went to trial. I didn't have that kind of money, but also didn't want to go to jail. So I gave him $25k, and eventually the charges got dismissed. So I paid $27,500 to defend myself against something I never did. Can I sue the government to get my money back? Yeah, right. We won't mention the being booked into jail, and twice spending a night in jail over this BS (once when arrested, again when the DA filed charges and jacked up my bail. Oh, I didn't mention I had 100k tied up in bail for a year? my bad).
Then, last year. Neighbor decides I've been banging on her door all day, looking into her window at night, and all sorts of other random BS. Cops are called, I get the humiliating sit outside your apartment with 3 cops around you treatment. She files a restraining order against me, with a whole bunch of BS in the complaint. I've learned my lesson, I hired a lawyer for $1500. He got the trial delayed, then when the trial hit not only was her testimony 100% provable bullshit, but her witness, who she brought on her own accord, 100% contradicted her story. I wanted lawyer fees. Judge says flat out he doesn't want to dissuade harassed women from using the court system and gave me half fees. With no payment schedule. In other words, not only am I flat out of $750 to start with, I have no way to collect the other $750 from this lying sack of female shit.
Do I think lawyers are overpaid scum? Not sure, what's it worth to you to stay out of jail, or not get a BS restraining order issued against you. Do I think our legal system sucks ass? You betcha.
Look on the bright side? OK, I'm a middle aged white dude so I didn't get shot. And I could come up with $27,500 the first time, and $1500 the second time, to defend myself against bullshit.
Where I used to live they put a very low cap on frivolous car accident claims(something like $2,500). This basically shot a bunch of the big fancy law firms, around my city, right in the face. This completely took the lawyers off guard. This was because it turned out that most of these firms had their big lawyers and even the fairly junior lawyers doing the meet and greet client stuff along with the big fancy cases. But the sue-the-guy-who-rear-ended-another-guy lawsuits for around $10,000 a pop were being handled by a bunch of paralegals with a very junior lawyer rubber stamping them. These just vanished as the lawyer's take from $2,500 just wasn't enough and even the guy suing couldn't be bothered for his take of $2,500.
I am not joking when I say that BMW sales plummeted in the city for years after.
So the question is not how much of a lawyer's duties can be handled by an AI, but how much of a lawfirm's duties can be handled by an AI. My second story in this regard was that I know someone who was an articling lawyer for a firm that specialized in DUIs. She and the other super juniors would handle an easy 90% of what went on with those cases. When things got dicy then the big guns would step in. Or the big guns would gladhand the clients into thinking that everything was being handled personally by them, but the reality was that low experience nobodies were just going through a near checklist set of steps.
I suspect that a huge amount of law would be similar. Divorces between people with boring finances, traffic issues, injuries, workers compensation, etc. That one case in many would be interesting enough that any lawyer had to grind their braincells very hard.
To me where this could get interesting is not the job losses but what happens when everyone has a lawyer app ready to go? I know that I really want a doctor app in my phone. A lawyer app, that just sounds like it should be called, Pocket Asshole 2000-Everybody should have another asshole in their pants.