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."

Comments

Re:Maybe AI is really nearly here

[dreamchaser]

They said they might replace lawyers, not intelligent life.

High-Frequency Lawyering

[UberVegeta]

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.