Will all our lawyers be robots?
The application of law to technology is one of the bellwether cases of how digital disruption will affect white collar jobs.
As technological progress picks up pace various forms of automation, new digital products, and responsive networks mean that traditional working activates and relationships are being undermined. The fear of the technological displacement of jobs, which used to be the purview of manual and blue collar workers, is now felt even at the commanding heights of the economy.
The questions on everyone’s lips is whether this signals complete replacement from the work force, or merely displacement towards new activities. In terms of labour markets, the latter merely marks a shift in the allocation of labour power, the former is far more fundamental.
The legal areas where new technologies are being felt are diverse and cover most of what is currently considered core parts of legal work. One particularly interesting example is contract analysis software, Kira. Kira will trawl through contracts and generate reports on their content on relevance. It can also carry out due diligence work on legal documents.
This is cognitively demanding work in the traditional sense, it requires attention, intelligence and training. However, applying machine learning to enough cases has made this task into something wrote.
Another fascinating case of the way technology affecting not the practice of, but the delivery of legal services, is the way on demand platforms allow legal work to circumvent traditional door keepers, expanding legal access. A platform like Rocket Lawyer lets anyone access legal assistance online and at a much lower cost.
These sorts of platform also allow for temporary, often lower skilled work forces to be brought into larger cases to do thinks such as document review (when these have not already been automated) where in house legal teams want to focus on more high value and high skill tasks. Whilst this may seem positive, it does mean that in house teams have less work for junior lawyers as individual cases become decomposed and multi-sourced.
These developments may seem to presage that robots and on demand platform are going to replace many legal jobs. A Deloitte survey claims that as many as 31,000 jobs in the legal sector have already been replaced by technology. A further 39 per cent of jobs were at “high risk” of being made redundant by machines in the next two decades according to the same study.
But whilst these developments will undoubtedly lead to some job losses, this does not mean that the legal profession is going to disappear. In some ways tech can serve to support legal profession. For example, machine-learning techniques are capable of predicting the outcomes of arbitrary Supreme Court cases with an accuracy of about 70%, and this creates an opportunity for legal practitioners to use such cases to inform their own legal strategy.
Anticipating this kind of development, The University of California, Berkeley Law School now teaches a litigation and statistics class. And many leading commentators see computer assisted legal practice as not only being a job in its own right, but also leading to the creation of many peripheral roles. Leading lawyer and scholar, Richard Susskind, believes that many new roles will come into existence. Legal risk management, legal project management, legal process analyst, and the legal IT systems expert will all be increasingly in demand roles.
Whilst many of these observations ring true, it remains to be seen just how far these new roles will be able to replace lost positions. To some extent this will depend on how innovative and creative law firms can be in using these new technologies, and how far ahead of the curve they can stay in comparison to their technological rivals. Either way, developments in the legal profession will provide many lessons for other white collar knowledge workers who are concerned about the impact of technology on their work.
