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."
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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They said they might replace lawyers, not intelligent life.
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!
Jr. Lawyers. But that's good enough, many pesticides kill creatures in their larval forms.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
AI is going to get rid of lawyers? I suddenly feel far more welcoming and accepting of this AI takeover.
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.
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.
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