Re:Jobs, robots, capitalism, inequality and you
by einhverfr on Saturday August 24, 2013 @11:10PM
(#6270740)
Which enables more complex litigation which requires more lawyers and more compliance effort.
Re:Jobs, robots, capitalism, inequality and you
by jaxn on Saturday August 24, 2013 @11:39PM
(#6270809)
For the cases that need more complex litigation, but that is a small minority.
Ex: We paid for clerks to transcribe a previous hearing. That could be replaced by software.
Re:Jobs, robots, capitalism, inequality and you
by einhverfr on Saturday August 24, 2013 @11:43PM
(#6270816)
Is there any evidence that demand for legal services is being suppressed by technology? In the absence of such where is that efficiency going?
Re:Jobs, robots, capitalism, inequality and you
by jaxn on Sunday August 25, 2013 @12:04AM
(#6270866)
Demand for legal services? I don't know about that, but demand for lawyers has definitely been suppressed. When the recent downturn took effect, firms quit hiring for 2-3 years. This left multiple classes of law students unable to find jobs. The firms also cut the paid internships. The hiring hasn't returned to the previous levels and the internships are still scarce.
I don't think we would be looking for a decrease in demand for the service as much as we should be looking for a decrease in demand for people to provide the service (likely due to increased efficiency by the service providers).
Maybe not one-for-one, but one lawyer with a state of the art data mining warehouse can probably do the job that used to require multiple lawyers. Tools like automated e-discovery or linguistic analysis have shown to be useful here. Here is an article on that topic from a while back:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagew...