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Lawyers are also among the many 'professionals' who are under pressure from the progressive robotisation and revolution of AI.
The legal profession has always been associated with confidentiality, a special relationship between client and lawyer, professional secrecy. All these concepts can be defined collectively: "trust".
So it seemed for a long time that as machine was not able to build a special customer relationship based on trust, so the legal industry did not expect automation.
A British legal researcher, Professor Richard Susskind- both a lawyer and a technology commentator - he often quotes a (real) anecdote, as the British National Law Society in the early 1990s pointed out to him to stop arguing that lawyers would in future communicate en masse by e-mail. After all, such communication would jeopardise client confidence in a lawyer...
Today, of course, an anecdote makes one smile, but the idea of AI algorithms writing a suit also makes one smile. Are the algorithms able to replace lawyers?
Yes and no. And the problem is very interesting and complex at the same time.
In their book "The Future of Professions", written together with his son (an economist), Susskind argues (in my opinion very convincingly) that algorithms will take over those functions among the professional professions, such as doctors, architects and lawyers, which are not creative but require repetitive actions. And especially those functions (fragments of the work) which are based on data analysis.
In the case of lawyers, it is therefore forecast that in the near future, the algorithms may carry out legal audits when buying companies (so-called 'due diligence') or prepare documentary evidence in large trials.
What is probably the quickest thing to do is that the AI algorithms will check the evidence - whether it is complete and so on.
Historically, IT has assisted lawyers in the resaerch. At this point, at the time of the AI revolution, the IT function began to shift from the "back office" to the "front office".
According to Richard Susskind, AI will quickly begin to prepare the first drafts of documents - pleadings and legal opinions. An example of such a product is the company Genie AI and its product SuperDrafter
https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/23/genie-ai/
SuperDrafter reads mechanically all the documentation in the law firm and on this basis he tells the lawyer constructing the new document the wording used earlier, in other documents.
The jobs of junior lawyers and so-called 'paralegals' - legal assistants - are therefore most at risk.
The AI revolution should be of global benefit to lawyers' clients. According to a well-known TED speaker, Henrie Arslanian, 4 billion people in the world could not afford access to legal aid, even in the US, which has the largest community of lawyers per capita, 80% of the population could not afford legal services.
Therefore, the creation of first versions of pleadings or contracts by algorithms would significantly increase the availability of legal services for consumers and small businesses.
Is it possible to automate the court hearings themselves?
In China, judges already use a number of machine learning algorithms to help them make decisions by automating their judgments. In criminal cases, the programme first summarises all the evidence and then suggests the size of the penalty, based on other similar cases across the country. This is intended to harmonise case-law. Is this applicable in a democratic country? At the very least, it is questionable...
An interesting trend, on the other hand, is the growing importance of amicable online dispute resolution. Already today, the vast majority of disputes concerning transactions on eBay are resolved through the eBay e-mediation platform. This is over 60 million cases per year.
Richard Susskind also predicts that new professions will emerge at the interface between law and technology: legal risk manager, legal technology engineers. Comprehensive legal risk management systems are certainly the future of corporate legal services in the coming decade.
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