Slashdot Mirror
Artificial Intelligence Closes In On the Work of Junior Lawyers (ft.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Financial Times article: After more than five years at a leading City law firm, Daniel van Binsbergen quit his job as a solicitor to found Lexoo, a digital start-up for legal services in the fledgling "lawtech" sector. Mr Van Binsbergen says he is one of many. "The number of lawyers who have been leaving to go to start-ups has skyrocketed compared to 15 years ago," he estimates. Many are abandoning traditional firms to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities or join in-house teams, as the once-unthinkable idea of routine corporate legal work as an automated task becomes reality (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). Law firms, which tend to be owned by partners, have been slow to adopt technology. Their traditional and profitable model involves many low-paid legal staff doing most of the routine work, while a handful of equity partners earn about 1m pound ($1.30m) a year. But since the 2008 financial crisis, their business model has come under pressure as companies cut spending on legal services, and technology replicated the repetitive tasks that lower-level lawyers at the start of their careers had worked on in the past. [...] "We get AI to do a bunch of things cheaply, efficiently and accurately -- which is most important," says Wendy Miller, partner and co-head of real estate disputes at BLP. "It leaves lawyers to do the interesting stuff."
if the sharks are starting to circle
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
It's frustrating to see any use of computers being called AI.
It's not intelligence to follow a decision tree. It's intelligence to come up with the decision tree.
Will the AI have a college degree to work as file clerk?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/business/college-degree-required-by-increasing-number-of-companies.html
Lawyers are the most overstaffed profession in existence - more lawyers go to do non-lawyer things than not after passing their Bar because there is such an over-saturation of lawyers.
This isn't unique in that respect, and this sort of thing has been going at least since Legal Zoom started in 2001.
This has been happening in engineering for some time now and combined with outsourcing the result is that companies are becoming increasingly top-heavy with lots of senior engineers while we hire less and less new graduates as the work that they used to cut their teeth on just isn't there anymore. It always gets billed as "freeing us up to do more interesting stuff" but the truth is that it ends up decreasing how many engineers a firm really needs while creating a barrier to entry for newer engineers as the bottom rungs of the ladder keep getting sawn off.
Lawyers are cheap to train but the degrees are expensive. That's made them highly desirable for schools. My Kid's in Nursing and the average GPA of a kid admitted into the undergrad program (e.g. third year classes) is 3.9. If she wanted to get into Law School it'd be much easier.
So we've got schools turning out lawyers left and right and making a surplus. Meanwhile we're putting them out of work. And just 'cause it's cheap doesn't mean the kids get a discount, so they're in debt up to their ears. That's a recipe for a lot of desperate sue happy lawyers who won't care much if they get disbarred since the degree's worthless anyway.
This folks is why socialists don't want to abandon people. When you do that they turn desperate and there's all sorts of nasty consequences. I guess we can use oppression to take 'em down a notch, but thing is unless you're part of the ruling class you're gonna get caught in the crossfire...
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If two firms both use computer power to do all of the meaningful work (especially finding prior art and swarm-learning reasonable rates for royalty/licensing), could we see a future where cases such as Apple vs. Samsung are decided in minutes not years?
Human communication is slow. Writing and reading letters is slow. Computers communicate faster than we do. Computers could argue with each other, an automated judge could decide the result, *and* the n-th level appeals could be adjudicated all within a few hundred milliseconds - leaving "mom and pop" corporate lawyers out of business.
I am now struggling to decide whether this would be a brilliant advance or a tragic loss for humanity. Better make this somebody's PhD project.
I knew I needed to stop reading Slashdot and finish my PhD when I started to miss articles by Bennett Haselton.
I'm really tired of articles that are basically just ads for the guy in the article. What exactly are they automating? So far the only aspect of legal work that has been automated over the past 15 years is electronic discovery and guess what the only reason we've seen any automation here is because the sheer number of electronic records now being stored makes it physically impossible for human beings to conduct a manual review of everything. You would have to employ the entire country to do nothing but review documents now if there wasn't some computer assistance in knocking out documents that don't contain key terms. And there is really no AI involved in the software that does this. I've worked with all of it. They OCR all the documents and run keyword searches. The documents that hit the keywords are then reviewed by humans (in India or the Philippines) more thoroughly and the stuff the outsourced labor tags as relevant is then reviewed by US attorneys in a 2nd pass reviews. There is sooooo much stuff being reviewed that the # of jobs in this field hasn't even declined stateside only now its done by contract attorneys out of tier 3 and 4 law schools in flyover states for $25 an hour and not biglaw associates in New York who graduated Harvard charging $200. That's all that's happened.
Briefs are still drafted by lawyers. No computer is going to replace the lawyer in motion drafting except in the most vanilla cases where the lawyer was never drafting anything anyway and was just copy pasting names into canned motion docs that got recycled from case to case.
So long as computers cant do depositions, do trial or show up at mediations lawyers are safe. I'd love to see a computer that can put together a witness prep binder or piece together an event chronology from 2,000 emails and 50 depositions (the transcripts of which are filled with lies you have to use your judgment to eliminate from your theory of the case). The day computers can do that kind of work is the day all humans everywhere are done with having jobs.
And yes I'm a lawyer.
With this ad. Cruz even nailed the look: it's the professional industries where the suits run everything. Very effective rhetoric.
Consistently, the people I have seen who are the biggest backers of any public policy or tech trend that reduces the need for people in the workplace are either:
1. The rich.
2. People in industries that seem to be semi-immune.
We might now get some real traction on a democratic debate over efficiency vs human cost because at some point, optimizing for efficiency leads to dystopian results.
What I don't get is why there's this hate-on for AI on Slashdot. Supposedly this is a community of free (as in speech) software geeks. AI is as free as in speech as you can GET!
AI SHOULD be Slashdot's favorite thing ever! This is the new generation of the free software movement!
Seems like most of the artifacts generated by lawyers are basic forms, with fields containing the specifics (beneficiaries, addresses, etc). Stuff like that is easy to implement as a web page, as is done by sites like LegalZoom, and at a fraction of the cost of using a meatbag lawyer.
As coal miners.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Q: Why does New Jersey have all the toxic waste dumps and California have all the lawyers?
A: Because New Jersey had first pick.
Mor eof em are going ot become politicians!! The horror the horror!
Founding a startup is way more constructive for society than being a lawyer in my opinion. So good one!
The parallels to IT and software development are striking and should be noted by everyone in our career field. Automation, offshoring and outsourcing of routine legal tasks has meant hugely depressed salaries and new lawyers not being able to find any entry-level work. This sounds exactly like what's happening in IT -- offshored help desk and outsourced data center positions leading to low wages or no jobs for people starting out.
This is interesting to me, because I live near New York City where most of the "BigLaw" firms have huge offices. It's been known for about 10 years (but ignored by many) that law school is now a waste of money if you are not in the top of your class in one of the top 14 law schools (according to US News and World Report) in the country (#1, 2 and 3 are Harvard, Yale and Stanford.) If you manage to make this cut, life is just fine for you. Big firms hire out of this pool and industry standard starting salary is $180K. If you last as a junior member of the firm, you're officially done worrying about life when you make partner. The only thing you will ever stress over again is whether to take the Bentley or the Rolls to the club this weekend, or what color the draperies in your Hamptons summer home should be. If you don't fall into that crowd, you might as well take the money you would spend on law school and light it on fire to achieve the same results.
The thing that's interesting is that the American Bar Association could have used their immense clout to save the pipeline of newbies. They chose to accredit tons of new law schools and encourage class size to increase even though the trend was for fewer lawyers on the horizon. This is how the American Medical Association keeps physicians' salaries high. They know that the only way to do this is to keep supply limited, so medical school slots are very tightly controlled. You need near-perfect grades, a photographic memory and the ability to ace the MCAT to even be considered. Then, you get 3 years of academic hazing where you're force-fed information, and years of low-salary, high stress internship/residency. If you can get through that, then you're a doctor and you're in the same Easy Street club as the BigLaw partners. It's just interesting to see how a professional organization can help like the AMA does or destroy the profession like the ABA is doing.
Not really automation but in 1970s I remember a news story of a paralegal got into trouble for practicing law without the degree and passing the Bar. She started a small business that does mundane legal services, very basic stuff (things like name changes, basic agreed divorce settlements) that is simply filling in forms and submitting to courts. She claimed these tasks where just one party is filing something or both parties agree to really minor stuff, she did a lot of tasks like this at a lawyer's office, the lawyer never signs anything or does any work but charges huge fees. So she started this business as these tasks are fast and easy (for her, someone outside the legal profession will not have a clue where to begin). Story went on that lawyers jumped on this business, "Oh no, not so fast. You gotta pass the Bar." (hmmm, if you pass the Bar with no degree, can you still practice law?).
Fast forward to 17% into the 21st century, here we are.
mfwright@batnet.com
It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are litigated.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"That isn't real AI, because it doesn't perfectly recreate a human mind!" since nobody actually knows how human mind works, no amount of programming is going to give you a human mind, until that is solved.
Also, "AI" is a marketing term. Marketing = Satan. No exceptions.
The machine learning cultists aren't even trying to blindly replicate the structures in human brain in any level of detail... They are too busy using their tools and tweaking their models, and going ko-ko-ko (sound a rooster makes) all over the media, with the likes of Nick Bostrom selling books? Lame.
This is funny and ironic and totally missing the point. We already have way more lawyers than we need. The problem is that lawyers designed our legal system to maximize the need for lawyers. That's why all contracts are written to be unintelligible to anyone who isn't a lawyer: instant guaranteed employment for countless lawyers to write contracts and review contracts and argue about the tiny details of contracts. You know that by law, anyone who isn't a patent lawyer is considered incompetent to judge whether they're infringing a patent? If you know a patent exists, you literally are required by law to hire a patent lawyer to tell you whether you're infringing it. If you don't and if you're found to infringe it, then it's willful infringement and you get hit with triple damages. Because you didn't hire a patent lawyer.
We could easily get rid of half the lawyers in the world, probably a lot more, by fixing the legal system to not require so many lawyers doing useless busywork. But instead people are trying to automate that useless busywork. It will still have to be done, but now the lawyers will have to compete with computers for the useless work they created.
The whole situation is so twisted and messed up.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Lawyers To Be Replaced With Perl Scripts
http://humorix.org/10523
This script, originally created as a way to generate mundane legal documents, achieved sentience last week and easily passed the Turing Test.
until the laws are authoritatively and rigorously expressed in a more precise language than English.
Google's working on something like it, but the whole field is still in its infancy.