How Artificial Intelligence Will Expand Opportunities for Human Lawyers
As the CEO of a company that leverages the power of artificial intelligence to help lawyers do their jobs better, a common concern I hear is: “Won’t this technology take away my job?”
I don’t dismiss these fears; in fact, I sympathize. The fact is,we’re seeing a proliferation of work being “lost” to automation and artificial intelligence in the consumer-facing world. Given the rate self-driving technology is progressing, I wouldn’t feel too comfortable right now if I were a short-haul truck driver, for example..
There are certainly parallels between the threats facing the truck-driving business and the legal industry — even the legal industry twenty years ago, when document review was first automated. Twenty years ago, there was plenty of document review work around for attorneys. Today, a smaller number of attorneys is needed to perform any given document review project, thanks to tech tools that help perform the job more efficiently, economically and accurately.
But despite the decline in lawyers working on document review, there wasn’t actually a decline in lawyers as a result of the new technology. There’s a big difference between the fact that some tasks lawyers used to spend a lot of time on — like document review — require less human effort, and the job of lawyering going away entirely. That’s just not happening. Instead, it’s far more likely that the kind of technology we’re developing at Casetext will actually create new possibilities for lawyers. That’s right: instead of reducing the number of legal jobs, it might actually create more.
It would not be the first time technology led to an unexpected increase in jobs that it was predicted to eliminate. As a few examples, let’s take garment workers, bank tellers and accountants. They were endangered by automation, ATM machines and the Excel spreadsheet, respectively. Despite those seemingly mortal dangers, all of those jobs are more plentiful now than they were before automation was introduced.
Why should the experience of lawyers be more similar to that of bank tellers than the worst-case scenario we’ve imagined for truck drivers? As I play out the implications, I see three reasons for great optimism. For now, consider this one:
Technology will allow lawyers to address unmet legal needs and serve more clients. According to studies, as many as 80% of legal needs go unmet due to a lack of resources. As technology makes client intake, research, discovery, brief writing, and other tasks more efficient, they will become substantially less costly to clients. Lawyers, in turn, will be able to grow their business by representing more clients, even the under-resourced. This is a win-win: lawyers bring in more clients, and people with real legal problems who have so far gone unassisted would get the help they need. This tracks what happened in the garment industry, where automation led to lower prices, which led to greater demand for new garments, in turn resulting in many more workers employed in the industry.
In a follow-up post, I’ll write about two additional, positive effects that AI is likely to have on legal jobs — which I predict will not only be more numerous, but also more rewarding.
