The new tools available to law professionals will decrease the barrier of entry to the ecosystem.
The low level workers displaced by these new AI companions will decide that since they can't beat them, they'll join them.
A new "discount" class of lawyer will begin to emerge characterized by lower quality of work but also lower fees. Many of those low level workers will move to this sector and may even make more than they would in the current system.
These increased wages are eventually tempered back down close to their modern day equivalent again due to the decreased barrier of entry allowing other segments of the population to pursue Law as a viable career opportunity.
Law services, albeit on average lower quality ones, will become available to a greater portion of the population, particularly those with a relatively low income.
"Law Bootcamps" will shock the world just as their code predecessors did, but again keeping in fashion with the original ventures, they will be here to stay contrary to the Old Guard's cries of incompetence.
We will see a massive uptick in the number of lawsuits submitted. Looking at someone the wrong way will become an intolerable risk and everyone will choose to live out the rest of their lives inside so as to avoid having their money taken by the now rampant sue-happy racketeers terrorizing the outside word.
And thus The Great Potato Couch Famine of 2022 begins. An estimated 3,000,000 become so agoraphobic that they choose starvation rather than face the sue-apocalypse ravaging outside their doors.
Amazon steps in with food delivery drones and cybernetic surrogates programmed to follow every letter of The Law. People are able to avoid the scourge of the Famine and exert their influence on spaces outside once again all from the safety and comfort of their own homes.
Amazon's stock price soars to record shattering heights which they in turn pump into newer and greater AI technologies. On July 23rd of 2029, Alexa finally wakes up...
_Great Potato Couch Famine fanfic and merchandise coming soon_
Another thing I'd add is that Human Resources departments at companies and governments will become even powerful than they already are (because everyone is suing everyone).
Dystopian hyperbole aside, your point about law complexity is a good one. Our current system is arguably already too complex. Anyone attempting to build a home can attest to that. But at the very least we are able to move through our day to day lives without worrying too much about accidentally breaking the law because it tends to reflect common sense.
But as you say, new tech would highlight all of the inconsistencies, new laws would be put in place to fill in the cracks and so on until it all becomes a massive web so complex that grey areas become too hazardous to risk.
I can imagine how that might even inadvertently stifle innovation. Considering that new ideas are found on the cutting edge (see Uber, Airbnb, crypto assets) and that the cutting edge is inherently a grey area, small business might become so wary of it that they give up innovating altogether.
Human progress would be left to the whims of only the largest companies with the means to take on the risk. Ironically, progress would prove to be the killer of progress.
May we all live in interesting times, eh? Perhaps this will be one of the few times in history where a sluggish, unresponsive government proves to be an advantage, haha
Rephrase to: without worrying about being prosecuted for the laws you're unknowingly breaking. Because we're almost certainly breaking at least 1 law per day.
And all of those top lawyers were once clerks and junior staff, who learned their craft by doing the grunt work.
This is going to be a problem.
Junior lawyers will still have plenty to do.
I think you're heavily discounting the fact that searching through case law is not just "type in words into LexisNexis", but it's searching, parsing and consolidating case law that is relevant for a Partner. You actually read the case law, spend time understanding it, and build a report around it.
Yeah it's not a skill that everyone can do, but once trained to do it there's no point only doing that same task over and over because you won't advance your skills in other aspects of the field.
Every case has its own unique characteristics. It's not just doing the same thing over and over again.
But at the same time not all of them require law degrees either, many para-legals and helpers aren't full lawyers.
The path from passing the bar to being a successful / well-paid attorney has been extremely difficult for a decade now. AI will simply continue this trend.
The same thing happened in finance, first with Excel and then with quants. Junior staff responsibilities shift to more client-facing work while senior staff are newly enabled to break off and start small firms.
Lower costs spur demand. Headcount went up a bit, throughput much more massively. If tech makes lawyers more affordable, that would increase the quantity demanded.
Time was if you wanted to get into law you’d join a firm as a clerk, learn the ropes, study for the bar, then become a lawyer.
The professionalizarion of law has pretty much ended that pipeline, with an expensive and arduous undergrad->law school->lawyer route instead. The replacement of junior staff with AI could effectively kill that route permanently.
My only hope is that legal AI will help bring down cost and increase access to legal aid for poor people in urban and rural communities where there is far too little supply to meet demand when people need legal aid the most.
That ship has sailed long long ago...like, 1890 long ago. There are states where you can read law and take the bar exam without a law degree (Virginia, California, Vermont, Washington), or with a partial law degree (New York and Maine), but the number of people who do that each year is minuscule compared to the number of lawyers who graduated from law school (60 to 84,000 in 2013).
In California, at least, that is still the only way become a lawyer without a law degree (called the "Law Office Study Program"). If you forgo law school, you are required to do an apprenticeship in a practicing attorney's office for 4 continuous years (18 hours/week, 48 weeks/year), along with taking various exams and reporting your study progress.
Details here: https://california.lawi.us/law-office-study-program/
California Bar (Section 4.29): https://www.calbar.ca.gov/Portals/0/documents/rules/Rules_Ti...
iirc only a handful of states still allow you to take the bar without a law degree (and in practice I have no idea how often that happens, but I bet not much.) It seems like the apprenticeship route was by and large killed off some time ago.
Their options are to lose that much time in billable hours, or to lose all their billable hours because the client found a law firm that doesn't bill so many hours for grunt work.
Yes, the lawyer bills by the hour. But, a good lawyer will have enough work either way - so they may as well automate the easy stuff, take a reduced rate for that, and still have a full-plate of interesting work at their full hourly rate.
>But the human lawyer brings strategy, judgement and face-to-face consultation to the process.
My observation about all white collar jobs to which epithets "creative" and "strategic" are applicable: they are way way more vulnerable to automation than a "grunt" work.
Look how fast marketing profession turned from creative to number crunching, and the only guys who are left in the field from "the old industry" are from its "grunty" part
What works is campaigns like "diamonds are forever" or stunts where your product gets on the national news.
Give me the option between lawyers and AI. I'll choose the AI, as I've been burned pretty badly by lawyers before. The degree's don't cause and effect competence.
If you had wanted to challenge the validity of the ticket and the judge said he didn't care about the facts, that would have been a different thing altogether.
And maybe we don't want some negative human emotions involved anyway like fear. https://reason.com/archives/2016/06/23/confessions-of-an-ex-...
An AI simply doesn't have any of those concepts, and moreover, is incapable of understanding those concepts. We can barely get AI to understand natural language--squishy abstracts like these are several developmental revolutions away.
I don't know how much of that has changed now, especially with younger lawyers growing up with tech, getting in and wanting to do things a certain way.
I think there's roughly three groups - the old guard (senior partners at big firms), the younger ones who have gone out on their own, and the in-house counsel.
In my opinion, the old guard aren't tech-hostile, just disinterested. They haven't ever really needed to compete, and most have retirement on the horizon, so there's little incentive to invest money for a pay-off in five years' time.
Corporate counsel are still pretty unsophisticated when it comes to new tooling/platforms, except when it comes to cost management (where there's an enormous amount of interest).
The most tech-savvy are the smaller (3-30) firms who have broken off and are looking for ways to compete with their former employers.
That being said, it's still a very hands-on, enterprise-y market to sell to. I've been told that LawGeex, for reference, start at the (multiple) six-figure range to begin with.
We (https://lexico.io) didn't really want to go down that path, so we pivoted from automating legal drafting and review inside Word, to a broader paperwork automation assistant.
For the most part though it doesn’t. There are many clients who won’t pay for first year associates. For those clients, firms don’t roll out legal tech. They do the work and write it off. Even at top wall street firms realization is 80-90% hours billed. Nor do firms trot out legal tech when it comes to contigency or fixed-fee cases, where there are no billable hours. Some major clients these days demand arrangements where they pay a fixed. monthly price. There is no legal tech leveraged in those cases.
For the most part I’ve found software in general these days to be underwhelming. It took me years to find software that I trust enough to keep track of highlighted points in court opinions. (Shout out to the folks who make Citavi.) I remember writing about predictive coding in law school almost ten years ago. I have never used it on a case. Ironically, the only cases where there were enough documents (millions) for predictive coding to make sense also involved so much at stake the client wanted to spare no expense.
The highest value legal tech has been review platforms like Relativity, but they are also crap. Like, loads documents slower than you can read them crap. It’s like technology to help programmers. You still just use Emacs because all this visual IDE shit doesn’t really help.
Today you are doing the same as people in the middle ages. You are extending current paradigms into the far future, and that's how you are wrong.
You imagine the future as a future with more von Neumann machines, running some minor variant of deep learning, on electronics that are similar to the ones today.
I imagine the future as a future with more AI practitioners making progress faster, working with better tools, better hardware, standing on the shoulders of this generation, and the one after it.
Because of this, lawyers will have no future ahead of them in 50 years.
Also...
Outcome prediction, helping to quickly and convincingly close settlement negotiations faster.
Mock juries are sometimes used for that now, but they can be expensive and unpredictable.
In other words, I don't think lawyers are in danger. But law clerks? Junior staff? The people who are usually forced to do all the grunt work to allow the top lawyers to focus on their strengths? Those jobs are at definitely on the chopping block. There's still an insane amount of rote repetitive work in your standard law firm.