Why lawyers shouldn’t be scared of tech

Technology will certainly change the profession, but probably for the better.

It’ll reduce the workload! Simple work will be automated! Everything will be streamlined!

To any sane person, this all sounds good. Who wouldn’t want processes to be made more simple, freeing up time, and saving money?

Well, lawyers.

Legal professionals are hired for developing specialised skills honed through university and professional experience. Law school often welcomes its students by telling them that they’ll learn to ‘think like a lawyer’.

It’s a very human industry which relies upon a nuanced understanding of what drives people’s actions, along with an analytical approach to black-letter law.

With that said, many jobs within law are easily automated. Document filing, cataloguing, sorting evidence, letter generation, standardised documentation — all of this is ripe for disruption by means of technology.

Both lawyers and computers are in the information business.

The problem is that law firms have not yet generated a model for dealing with the growing influence of technology. Fees tend to be generated on a six-minute unit basis.

How do you charge for a document which was automatically generated? It was based on a lawyer’s work, but repeated many times. Do you pass the savings to the client?

This is hardly a new issue. The potential for technology to create massive inequality in the labour market is well documented. See just two articles here (Vice Motherboard) and here (MIT Technology Review). As it turns out, a lot of what we do is pretty replaceable or least augmented by technology.

This draws obvious parallels to farming on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution. Farm work employed the majority of the population which remained in the countryside (cities were not the feature they are today).

Technology came in and did many people out of a job. Poverty increased for many whilst wealth increased for the few. The Luddites were a feature of this transition of labour.

This is not to say that modern technology will do the same, but it certainly has the potential to.

So where do lawyers come in?

Lawyers are skilled professionals but rely on a huge amount of unskilled processes to carry on their work. These processes will almost certainly be replaced by technology over the next few years.

The issue lies in the fact that fee models are not yet ready for this, nor are many lawyers individually. As I mentioned in a previous article, law is a conservative profession. Technology does not leave much room for this.

With the coming technological upheaval, lawyers ought to celebrate, not be uncomfortable. Increased efficiences are more likely to raise profit than not, and allow for an increased focus on interesting legal questions which do require a human’s analysis rather than the routine work that must be done but does not provide much intellectual stimulus.

Technology will certainly change the profession, but probably for the better.

In the meanwhile, lawyers may do well to start learning how to work with the new tools available in the same way that one would prepare for a case.

Put down that statute book and pick up some PHP, or Ruby. Read up on machine learning, or come up with new revenue models. It’s going to happen either way.