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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."
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.
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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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.
AI is going to get rid of lawyers? I suddenly feel far more welcoming and accepting of this AI takeover.
Be careful what you wish for. The tech will make lawsuits cheaper to file, and may result in a lot more frivolous legal actions. The system will be even more distorted toward big corps which will have access to legal automation, and against small firms and individuals. This will make it more difficult than ever to try to use the courts pro per, without paying a law firm.