A Must Read Book for Law Students on the Future Practice of Law
“Where there’s change, there are opportunities. Changes are violent right now,” stated serial entrepreneur and tech magnate Terry Matthews in an interview to the Globe and Mail circa 2015. Mr. Matthews was marvelling at the potential of cloud computing to reshape business, and his enthusiasm was justified. Cloud computing fundamentally altered business practices by allowing workers to access data and applications remotely to collaborate easily from anywhere in the world. Similarly, modern applications of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) are creating drastic change and profoundly altering the way firms do business — legal practice is no exception.
In Benjamin Alarie and Abdi Aidid’s The Legal Singularity, they argue that AI with its current capabilities is the most transformative technology to impact legal practice since the printing press. While their claim is bold, the authors not only do a wonderful job defending their position, they reshape the way readers think about the future of law while doing so.
Past Technological Advancements Did Not Fundamentally Alter Legal Practice
Prior technological advances to legal practice have merely been “translational,” meaning they took information in one format and reproduced it in another. AI goes far beyond this. To illustrate just how transformative the application of AI to the law is, Alarie and Aidid give us a brief history of the three major eras of legal practice: analogue, digital, and computational (the present era).
The Analogue Era
One’s capacity to practice law is limited by their ability to access legal information in the form of statutes, legal textbooks, law journals and the like. Therefore, in the analogue era, accessing physical copies of legal texts greatly constrained a lawyer’s practice. While the distribution of these printed texts was a great upgrade over manually transcribing them, there remained serious limitations. These texts were not only expensive but also cumbersome as they required physical space for storage. Yet, the ability to access them was vital as judges and adjudicators require reference to legal authorities to discern what the law is or should be. This meant spending hours upon hours poring over the law books to conduct legal research, only to perhaps miss an important case that opposing counsel happened upon.
The Digital Era
Much to the modern law student’s delight, in comes the CanLIIs, Westlaws and Quicklaws of the world. The mass digitization of legal texts freed practitioners from the need to possess physical legal texts to advance their clients’ positions. Keyword searches of these databases meant quicker and more thorough legal research. While the cost of certain of these subscriptions remains prohibitive for many (a topic deserving its own article), in theory they give practitioners less excuse for failing to identify pertinent authorities.
The Computational Era
One defining difference between the above eras of legal advancement and the present, computational era, is that in former eras the legal information found in statutes, textbooks, caselaw and beyond never changed in substance. This information merely shifted in form from written to digital. Meanwhile, modern applications of AI can generate altogether new kinds of legal knowledge. I am not talking about random caselaw created by a ChatGPT hallucination: I am talking about a program specifically designed for legal practice opining on what the law is or ought to be based on its ability to consume large swaths of legal data and think rationally about it. Credible opinions on the law generated by something other than humans goes beyond translation and into the realm of an altogether new category of legal information. The application of this new category and many other AI applications will demand novel approaches to legal practice.
Practitioners Must Adapt or be Left Behind
There are many ways in which a client represented by a lawyer who refuses to adopt AI technology will be significantly disadvantaged where the counterparty’s lawyer leverages AI against them.
Imagine a dispute where one counsel uses predictive and generative AI to cut through the masses of relevant caselaw, serve up the pertinent authorities, and opine on their application and likely outcomes. Having quick access to answers to discrete questions of law, this lawyer can begin to focus on other areas of the dispute. The AI-wielding lawyer may begin to refine the preliminarily analysis which the AI drafted based on the relevant authorities it identified while the first lawyer continues to search for those same authorities. All else being equal, this should lead to the AI-equipped lawyer providing better legal representation as they can cut through the noise and more quickly understand the merits of their client’s case.
The above example may feel too “far-fetched” for some. So, consider the following scenario where AI adoption is already granting considerable advantage. Imagine two opposing counsels litigating a case with a sizeable amount of documentary evidence. The first lawyer employs their juniors to sift through the records, while the second leverages an AI-powered e-discovery tool trained to recognize and flag issues for them. Of course, given that these e-discovery methods are approximately 50 times faster, the lawyer who employs them will save themselves considerable time and pass on savings to their clients. What’s more, the lawyer who manually reviewed the documentary evidence may see their awarded costs reduced for their failure to employ an AI-powered discovery tool (see Drummond v The Cadillac Fairview Corp Ltd, 2018 ONSC 6959). The lawyer who offers quality service for less will likely see their market share increase, while non-adopters see theirs decrease.
Conclusion
Just as Terry Matthews envisioned the benefits his businesses would reap from doubling down on cloud computing to the detriment of slower competitors, early adopters of AI-powered legal tools will be similarly enticed. Early and successful adopters will compete against those who limit themselves exclusively to technology developed in previous eras and enjoy an outsized advantage. In short, the game has been changed, and with that change comes great opportunity for those willing to take it.
