Artificial Intelligence Closes In On the Work of Junior Lawyers (ft.com) 103
An anonymous reader shares a Financial Times article: After more than five years at a leading City law firm, Daniel van Binsbergen quit his job as a solicitor to found Lexoo, a digital start-up for legal services in the fledgling "lawtech" sector. Mr Van Binsbergen says he is one of many. "The number of lawyers who have been leaving to go to start-ups has skyrocketed compared to 15 years ago," he estimates. Many are abandoning traditional firms to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities or join in-house teams, as the once-unthinkable idea of routine corporate legal work as an automated task becomes reality (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). Law firms, which tend to be owned by partners, have been slow to adopt technology. Their traditional and profitable model involves many low-paid legal staff doing most of the routine work, while a handful of equity partners earn about 1m pound ($1.30m) a year. But since the 2008 financial crisis, their business model has come under pressure as companies cut spending on legal services, and technology replicated the repetitive tasks that lower-level lawyers at the start of their careers had worked on in the past. [...] "We get AI to do a bunch of things cheaply, efficiently and accurately -- which is most important," says Wendy Miller, partner and co-head of real estate disputes at BLP. "It leaves lawyers to do the interesting stuff."
Maybe AI is really nearly here (Score:2)
Re:Maybe AI is really nearly here (Score:5, Funny)
They said they might replace lawyers, not intelligent life.
Re:Maybe AI is really nearly here (Score:5, Funny)
Jr. Lawyers. But that's good enough, many pesticides kill creatures in their larval forms.
Re:Maybe AI is really nearly here (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Maybe AI is really nearly here (Score:5, Insightful)
AI is going to get rid of lawyers? I suddenly feel far more welcoming and accepting of this AI takeover.
Be careful what you wish for. The tech will make lawsuits cheaper to file, and may result in a lot more frivolous legal actions. The system will be even more distorted toward big corps which will have access to legal automation, and against small firms and individuals. This will make it more difficult than ever to try to use the courts pro per, without paying a law firm.
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Lawyers have a Fiduciary Duty [cornell.edu] to their clients. This would seem to mean that ANYTHING of a legal nature that enters the legal system will need to be reviewed by a lawyer for accuracy and to ensure that it represents their client's best interest.
I don't see how an AI program can fulfill a Fiduciary responsibility.
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Just wait for the government to use this against its population in civil and criminal court. It is already being used to prevent the convicted from challenging sentencing.
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If lawyers are so bad how come so many people want to be one?
David E. Kelley.
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It pays well and is one very good path to a political career.
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I'll be back... (Score:3)
It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are litigated.
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if the sharks are starting to circle
Uh, oh. AI replacing lawyers would drive the US unemployment rate to fifty percent.
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http://humorix.org/10187 [humorix.org]
http://humorix.org/10303 [humorix.org]
Software Automation != AI (Score:3, Insightful)
It's frustrating to see any use of computers being called AI.
It's not intelligence to follow a decision tree. It's intelligence to come up with the decision tree.
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AI is acheived when the results are indiscernible from or better than a human.
Gosh, that means I've been creating AI in the form of scripts that automate mundane tasks, for many years now. Either that, or your simplistic statement is completely off base.
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It's frustrating to see any use of computers being called AI.
It's not intelligence to follow a decision tree. It's intelligence to come up with the decision tree.
What does it really matter when the impact and outcome is the same? Low-paid legal staff used to have a viable job. Soon, they will be no longer necessary.
Do autonomous vehicles have to be AI-perfect in order to disrupt and displace human drivers? Hell no. The solution merely has to kill less humans than human drivers do. Shouldn't be too hard a task to do, since we meatsacks suck at driving, and kill hundreds every day.
It's long been argued that we humans only use a mere fraction of our brains capaci
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Not data entry, data extraction. Building connections between documents. Computers do these things well, better and better as they are trained with appropriate data sets. They do these faster than than humans, by orders of magnitude. Robots will always win in the long run. John Henry won but he died doing it, the machine lived to continue working. Machines always win.
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[nitpick]AI cars have to kill *far* less than human drivers to be viewed as "safe"[/nitpick]
I think that we will see a rapid evolution from decision tree to true AI for legal stuff.
As long as I know the decision tree your program uses I can game around it. If it decides that if (infringement-lawsuit) < N is not worth suing over then I just make sure the lawsuit portion evaluates to a big enough number that the algo ignores me. I'm sure there will be a way to game the heuristics (much like the psychedel
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Got a BS to go with that AI... (Score:3)
Will the AI have a college degree to work as file clerk?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/business/college-degree-required-by-increasing-number-of-companies.html [nytimes.com]
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They are selecting for people just like the current batch of office worker's/middle management's children. Taking care of their own. Subconscious for most but you can bet their is some overt tit for tat.
People that had 4 years to waste getting useless college degrees on a party oriented campus, now living in the basement (and preventing the 'rents from getting their freak on, 'Acid House' style.)
File clerks still exist? Sort of, someone has to unjam the scanner.
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Sort of, someone has to unjam the scanner.
Have you ever tried to unjam a high-end multifunction printer? At one job I was at, the print tech was home sick. It took four techs to figure out how to unjam a printer, as the user manual was missing from the back of the printer and the diagrams on the inside panels made no sense whatsoever. It would have been easier to take the entire machine apart and put it back together.
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Yes, college job. Freshman engineering student. I was the only non-management employee authorized to unjam the big old Xerox's paper path. Even there, not without being walked through it, then checked for competence. Letting people figure that kind of thing out, gets you visits from the 'scratch faery'.
But they were all allowed to unjam the document feeder.
Market Oversaturation (Score:5, Interesting)
Lawyers are the most overstaffed profession in existence - more lawyers go to do non-lawyer things than not after passing their Bar because there is such an over-saturation of lawyers.
This isn't unique in that respect, and this sort of thing has been going at least since Legal Zoom started in 2001.
Q: Why does... (Score:2, Funny)
Q: Why does New Jersey have all the toxic waste dumps and California have all the lawyers?
A: Because New Jersey had first pick.
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An idle smart lawyer is kind of a dangerous thing. He can put three more to work, with one bright idea.
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I can guarantee that LegalZoom has not cost any lawyer in America a single job. If anything the disasters their forms lead to when filed by incompetent lay people have probably created several billion dollars of actual work for lawyers.
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Actually, if it's oversaturated, the price of lawyering should go down. Instead of paying $200+/hr for a lawyer, we should be able to get our cases through court for $19.95 all inclusive.
Unless lawyering is somehow immune from supply and demand.
Or lawyers are smart enough to realize there are too many of them and somehow manage to cull the herd (by denying juniors the chance to apprentice, forcing new graduates to do lesser jobs).
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Lawyering is cover for influence peddling. You just need a law degree to participate.
See also the new prevalence of 'lawyer/aids' in politics. Being subpoena proof has value.
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I'll be sure to pass that little info nugget along to all the battered wives and blue collar workers fucked over by their employers we've represented over the decades. Should be good for a laugh or two.
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You're one of those oversaturated shysters whose market value is actually going down.
The ones that make $400/hour + are just selling influence and legally secret criminal advice (being 'criminal attorneys').
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Sorry to burst your bubble, but we've been at nice, steady growth for 12 years now. It's other lawyers shutting up shop, not us. Then again, we didn't get into the biz for money...
But you go ahead and stick to your generalizations, they obviously keep you warm at night.
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My father once told about his now dead business associate who visited in the US in some legal matter. He was working with a US law firm in some international issue ( I assume). The Finnish firm sent him alone to cover all bases, while the US firm sent literally a dozen people. The lone lawyer in the wild got puzzled looks from his US colleagues. I have to assume they were all specialized and trained in different fields of law, like medical doctors. What else could explain the difference?
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> I have to assume they were all specialized and trained in different fields of law, like medical doctors. What else could explain the difference
The U.S. law firm assessed how deep their client's pockets were and assign the right number of lawyers to extract the maximum amount of money without getting fired or sued themselves.
Same Thing In Engineering (Score:3, Interesting)
This has been happening in engineering for some time now and combined with outsourcing the result is that companies are becoming increasingly top-heavy with lots of senior engineers while we hire less and less new graduates as the work that they used to cut their teeth on just isn't there anymore. It always gets billed as "freeing us up to do more interesting stuff" but the truth is that it ends up decreasing how many engineers a firm really needs while creating a barrier to entry for newer engineers as the bottom rungs of the ladder keep getting sawn off.
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Accountants too. It's been happening with many white collar jobs.
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What kind of engineer are you talking about?
You story flies in the face of what I've seen, and what continuously gets posted here on Slashdot. I keep hearing that senior engineers are considered worthless and they are constantly fired for cheaper junior engineers or outsourced work. The technology makes it easier for a junior engineer to get started in the field and produce quality results, and the H1B race-to-the-bottom makes it hard for senior engineers to get decent pay.
This is gonna get real ugly (Score:5, Insightful)
So we've got schools turning out lawyers left and right and making a surplus. Meanwhile we're putting them out of work. And just 'cause it's cheap doesn't mean the kids get a discount, so they're in debt up to their ears. That's a recipe for a lot of desperate sue happy lawyers who won't care much if they get disbarred since the degree's worthless anyway.
This folks is why socialists don't want to abandon people. When you do that they turn desperate and there's all sorts of nasty consequences. I guess we can use oppression to take 'em down a notch, but thing is unless you're part of the ruling class you're gonna get caught in the crossfire...
Re: This is gonna get real ugly (Score:3, Interesting)
Law professors get pretty big salaries, and the program needs to fund entirely from tuition.
I doubt they're the cheapest to teach by a long shot.
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Law is a bifurcated profession. Only the graduated from the so called T14 schools have any real hope of a real legal career today. Them and the top 5% out of the other schools more or less. Graduates from all the other schools are basically getting paralegal certificates. The majority of them will never really practice law and will be happy with administrative jobs in local government of JD optional type "compliance" jobs in healthcare or finance. But this has been the case since the 1920's really. We've al
Re:This is gonna get real ugly (Score:4, Interesting)
most of the time i go to the drug store it seem pharmacists do nothing more than pull a bottle off the shelf, measure out some pills or add some water to it and give it to me
maybe another version of the fast food robot can do the same?
Re:This is gonna get real ugly (Score:4, Insightful)
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Pharm tech != pharmacist.
CVS has a one actual pharmacist on a shift, maximum. If they can't fill a complicated prescription, right then, it's because they don't have an actual pharmacist at that store, right then.
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If ever a profession was ripe for automation it was "Primary Care Doctor."
In many countries this has already happened. When you "see the doctor" you are actually seeing a nurse with a flowchart. You only see a real doctor if your case is non-routine.
Studies have shown [biomedcentral.com] that a nurse with a flowchart or checklist is actually less likely to make a misdiagnosis than a doctor not using one. So the result is better healthcare at lower cost.
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60% of doctors are internists or family practitioners. 60% can be replaced and that's being conservative.
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Here is my recent medical diagnosis. ...
problem with eye, go to Dr, looks at me across the room, conjunctivitis and a prescription for antibiotic drops
Returned a week later, no results, more antibiotic drops
Returned a week later, no results, antibiotic pills
Week later, ordered MRI,"Go to the ER"
Hospital stay for 7 days, infused with three different hi powered Antibiotics... Hmmm curious
Transferred to Stanford Medical, two days Anti-biotic, changed diagnosis prescribed steroids.
Immediate results. (Literally
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"This folks is why socialists don't want to abandon people. When you do that they turn desperate and there's all sorts of nasty consequences"
This accounts for the overflowing supermarket shelves in Venezuela. Otherwise, people would be rioting in the streets.
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I would suggest to you (and the GP) that you are correct, except for one thing. When capitalism abandon's people there is usually someone else to pick of the slack ... for a price. When socialism abandons people, it ends up like Venezuela, a totalitarian hell hole.
You cannot take someone who refuses to adapt themselves to changing economic, political, and social conditions, and wave the money wand and make it all better.
But you can wave more government provided goodies and they'll vote for you.
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Now you have created artificial life.
With a lifespan short than a mayfly. Will take a lot AIs of this type to generate a billable hour.
High-Frequency Lawyering (Score:5, Interesting)
If two firms both use computer power to do all of the meaningful work (especially finding prior art and swarm-learning reasonable rates for royalty/licensing), could we see a future where cases such as Apple vs. Samsung are decided in minutes not years?
Human communication is slow. Writing and reading letters is slow. Computers communicate faster than we do. Computers could argue with each other, an automated judge could decide the result, *and* the n-th level appeals could be adjudicated all within a few hundred milliseconds - leaving "mom and pop" corporate lawyers out of business.
I am now struggling to decide whether this would be a brilliant advance or a tragic loss for humanity. Better make this somebody's PhD project.
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Having the computers duke it out quickly would make sense, but the Law profession has a lot of disincentives against going down that path. They charge by billable hours. Therefore the longer they draw out, and the more lawyers they have working on a case the more money they make.
They charge for paper copies of things, so they print out PDFs, make copies, send the paper to other law firms that scan them and make PDFs and repeat. The law firms charge per page for the copies and the scanning. It would be more
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If my AI is competing against a human using billable hours, and can do things in minutes vs weeks/years, then the AI will win, as I will be able to send my AI against more humans than a slow human could. This means, efficiencies are brought into the market and the results are eventually the humans won't be able to compete.
If one AI can replace a million human lawyers/clerks/interns/paralegals, it should.
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If you replace your side with a machine, your costs go down, the only side "wasting" money is the one with "billable hour lawyers". Your costs go down, their stays the same, you have the advantage. Eventually the other side will do the same, or die stagnating in a competitive world.
I'll always choose efficiency, even marginal ones.
No specifics (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm really tired of articles that are basically just ads for the guy in the article. What exactly are they automating? So far the only aspect of legal work that has been automated over the past 15 years is electronic discovery and guess what the only reason we've seen any automation here is because the sheer number of electronic records now being stored makes it physically impossible for human beings to conduct a manual review of everything. You would have to employ the entire country to do nothing but revi
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There have been some pretty good advances in natural language processing beyond keyword matching, and computers can be used to assist a lot of work. A big bank just devloped a system that could review certain types of contracts; the technology of parsing text for meaning is slowly inching towards useability. In the examples you raised, the time you need to spend and certain forms expertise required can be reduced so there will be less work. There still need to be human lawyers, but in the future the number
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With the eventual automation of all jobs what will be left for humans to do is fight over who owns the fruits of the labor that the automation is producing. So ultimately we may be left with lawyers and AI maintenance techs as the only human jobs. With automated judging systems , govt will be irrelevant but presenting arguments will still be a human job because it comes down to motivation - AIs have no motivation to do anything.
Ted Cruz nailed it in the primaries (Score:2)
With this ad [youtube.com]. Cruz even nailed the look: it's the professional industries where the suits run everything. Very effective rhetoric.
Consistently, the people I have seen who are the biggest backers of any public policy or tech trend that reduces the need for people in the workplace are either:
1. The rich.
2. People in industries that seem to be semi-immune.
We might now get some real traction on a democratic debate over efficiency vs human cost because at some point, optimizing for efficiency leads to dystopian
Oh boy, another AI topic (Score:3)
What I don't get is why there's this hate-on for AI on Slashdot. Supposedly this is a community of free (as in speech) software geeks. AI is as free as in speech as you can GET!
AI SHOULD be Slashdot's favorite thing ever! This is the new generation of the free software movement!
Hardly Surprising (Score:2)
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Well that is true, and its a problem. Jr. lawyers get to be senior lawyers not just as a function of aging but by helping partners etc at a firm. Even though its not an apprenticeship it is, in many respects. Yes you can go practice law having earned your JD and passed the bar, but you really are no good to anyone or no better than a computer expert system like LegalZoom anyway. I have lots of layers in the family so I have heard the stories.
In the past a JL would spend 80% of their time doing grunt wor
Just retrain them (Score:3)
As coal miners.
Startup is way better (Score:1)
The ABA chose not to save them (Score:3)
The parallels to IT and software development are striking and should be noted by everyone in our career field. Automation, offshoring and outsourcing of routine legal tasks has meant hugely depressed salaries and new lawyers not being able to find any entry-level work. This sounds exactly like what's happening in IT -- offshored help desk and outsourced data center positions leading to low wages or no jobs for people starting out.
This is interesting to me, because I live near New York City where most of the "BigLaw" firms have huge offices. It's been known for about 10 years (but ignored by many) that law school is now a waste of money if you are not in the top of your class in one of the top 14 law schools (according to US News and World Report) in the country (#1, 2 and 3 are Harvard, Yale and Stanford.) If you manage to make this cut, life is just fine for you. Big firms hire out of this pool and industry standard starting salary is $180K. If you last as a junior member of the firm, you're officially done worrying about life when you make partner. The only thing you will ever stress over again is whether to take the Bentley or the Rolls to the club this weekend, or what color the draperies in your Hamptons summer home should be. If you don't fall into that crowd, you might as well take the money you would spend on law school and light it on fire to achieve the same results.
The thing that's interesting is that the American Bar Association could have used their immense clout to save the pipeline of newbies. They chose to accredit tons of new law schools and encourage class size to increase even though the trend was for fewer lawyers on the horizon. This is how the American Medical Association keeps physicians' salaries high. They know that the only way to do this is to keep supply limited, so medical school slots are very tightly controlled. You need near-perfect grades, a photographic memory and the ability to ace the MCAT to even be considered. Then, you get 3 years of academic hazing where you're force-fed information, and years of low-salary, high stress internship/residency. If you can get through that, then you're a doctor and you're in the same Easy Street club as the BigLaw partners. It's just interesting to see how a professional organization can help like the AMA does or destroy the profession like the ABA is doing.
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"It's just interesting to see how a professional organization can help like the AMA does or destroy the profession like the ABA is doing."
Yes, the AMA will do anything to ward off the threat of affordability in medicine.
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"In a fight between AMA and Big Insurance, my money is on the insurance companies."
It's all going to come down to how much money can be piled on by both sides. If the insurance companies had any clout compared to what the AMA has, then doctors could be trained in 14-day "MD Bootcamps" the same way we send people to coder schools. Physicians would see their salaries drop to a tiny fraction of what they're being paid today.
I admit I'm totally cynical and don't understand the nuances of lobbying. But, I think
Paralegal tried "automation" back in the days (Score:2)
Not really automation but in 1970s I remember a news story of a paralegal got into trouble for practicing law without the degree and passing the Bar. She started a small business that does mundane legal services, very basic stuff (things like name changes, basic agreed divorce settlements) that is simply filling in forms and submitting to courts. She claimed these tasks where just one party is filing something or both parties agree to really minor stuff, she did a lot of tasks like this at a lawyer's office
Useless AI to replace useless lawyers? (Score:2)
This is funny and ironic and totally missing the point. We already have way more lawyers than we need. The problem is that lawyers designed our legal system to maximize the need for lawyers. That's why all contracts are written to be unintelligible to anyone who isn't a lawyer: instant guaranteed employment for countless lawyers to write contracts and review contracts and argue about the tiny details of contracts. You know that by law, anyone who isn't a patent lawyer is considered incompetent to judge
Already predicted in 2004 (Score:2)
http://humorix.org/10523 [humorix.org]
This script, originally created as a way to generate mundane legal documents, achieved sentience last week and easily passed the Turing Test.
AI? The task hasn't even begun (Score:2)
Google's working on something like it, but the whole field is still in its infancy.