I don't. They'll just pass a law to make robot lawyers illegal. Rent seeking can be a powerful force against automation.

It will play out like H&R Block in accounting. One firm will aggressively automate most procedural, standard advisory and contract law, undercutting the rest. They will be joined by others for the race to the bottom. The beginnings already exist. https://medium.com/legal-tech/legal-tech-startups-9755b18f93...

PS. Any legal firm without a strategy here can hire me (at lawyer rates) to tell them how to get with the program. ;)

And yet TurboTax exists.

Why did no one pass a law against "robot accountants"?

> They'll just pass a law to make robot lawyers illegal.

You make that sound like a bad thing.

God knows humans fuck a lot of things up. And a lot of legal professions are mostly busywork, which I assume AI can help with. But allowing machines to literally rule us is a long, long way from a good idea, and that's essentially what will happen if you let AI take over e.g. trial lawyering.

Indeed. I know a couple of people who have transitioned from programmers to lawyers and they say, a contract is just a program you run on a courtroom, the judge is the CPU.

Sounds straightforward for the Bar association and lawmakers to not allow software to practice law. What profession are lawmakers typically? Lawyers.

Some careers will be automated away, except for the ones that can’t be or those that aren’t allowed to by cabals.

Lawyers can't be literally replaced by robots.

No, what will instead happen is that a lawyer will be given tools that will allow them to be 100% more efficient on their own, thereby reducing the available jobs by 50%.

Even something as simple as improved search tools makes researching much quicker, which is an important part of their job.

That’s one way it could play out. Another way is that these tools that make lawyers more efficient increase the amount of legal work that takes place unnecessarily, extracting more dollars from the economy that the profession otherwise would.

You might like this essay:

http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/I...

Loved the essay! Thank you for sharing!

Maybe the courts won't be so backlogged, and public defenders so overworked, and we could give more people fair trials instead of pushing so hard for a guilty plea.

They can always just cut public funding more and restore the status quo. It's not like their current lack of funds is because we are literally out of money, it's because they're not a priority.

I think the biggest issue with lawyers getting automated is torts and court litigations or other pieces of legal work not to do with generating or reviewing contracts that can be automated quite easily which would mean no need for a human judge or adjudicator and thus a robot adjudicator who blindly follows a law written by "robots" too?

Note: I believe there won't be a need for human judges because robots tend to follow deterministic patterns much easily than non-deterministic, and thus you would probably not need humans to do much judging, displacing humans and turning to robots.

Law is a buggy, occasionally self-contradictory program intended to be executed by humans. If robot judges become a thing, we can be pretty sure all of the human programmers have been replaced already.

I'm reminded of the one Trek episode where Kirk is on trial, because the computer is never wrong. It was of course, because it had garbage input. But really, you gotta love UX where the VENT ATMO button is right next to the SKIP TRACK button.