The robotic lawyer wears no suit
Robotic lawyer. Say goodbye to the suits! The robots are doing all your legal work! No more expensive legal bills! Free candy for everyone! Sounds like a dream, right? Well… Let us not get all fired up. We are far from there yet, so let us focus on the basics in the meantime.
Artificial intelligence (AI), robotic lawyers, democratizing, smart contracts… That is just a quick list of buzzwords noticed after five minutes of browsing on legal tech on Twitter. The term legal tech refers to the technology used to provide legal services. The concept is rather spacious: it covers everything from dull concepts like Contractbook or websites that help you find the right lawyer to artificially intelligent robots who could potentially render the need for actual human suit wearing lawyers.
The legal tech business used to be a tiny army of lawyers trying to solve the issues they stumbled upon while turning pages at Stanford. Now it is turning into one of the biggest buzzword parties in history and perhaps the most hyped tech-trend in 2017… Apart from cryptocurrencies.
However, it is not all buzzwords. A disruption in the legal industry is inevitable and truly needed. You will certainly find great tech companies doing really groundbreaking stuff around the world and since everyone hates paying for suits, it is not a bad idea in general.
Then again… We are still a long way from artificial intelligence and robotic lawyers taking over lawyer’s jobs and a solid foundation for handling basic legal practices is far from being adequate. So why do we not address this bottom up?
Back to basics
It is of course way more interesting to invent the light bulb (the AI lawyer), which is why 80 % of the focus and energy spent on disrupting the legal industry leans towards replacing lawyers. But even if a machine was able to take over a lawyer’s job tomorrow, clients would still be horrible far behind.
It seems quite silly to have a robotic lawyer driven by AI with the ability to read 1 trillion pages per second when its printer functions like a North Korean food program, when the amateurish scanning software makes it dyslectic and when it asks for credit card details when requesting for a standard contract.
It is just plain weird that our general consensus is that we are close to grasping this crazy AI-technology and when 99 % of the tech companies have not made it past PDF, Dropbox, printers, and scanners. In an emerging world of AI the end game should be to trend towards a more digital product.
There is evidence for change here… Xero, e-conomic and several other economic systems used a significant amount of hard work to ensure companies that their financials would: 1. Be safe in the cloud. 2. Be handled a bit more efficiently than in Excel.
So… There are a lot of companies doing legal tech, and it seems more and more like the average Joe has accepted that even the basics of a signature can be done without wet ink. We might be ready for those AI robotic lawyer in a couple of years, but let us get back to basics first and get the foundations done rock solid.
