Preparing for the Future of Legal Work
AI, Automation and the Changing Job Landscape in the Legal Industry
Firms, corporates, non-profits and government entities all concern themselves with hiring lawyers, new and experience. But, given the advances of AI, specifically the tools dealing with written content, what is the outlook for lawyers (and other similar professions) in the age of AI?
What Is Happening To Everyone Else?
The World Economic Forum released a report in 2020 which found:
By 2025, automation and a new division of labour between humans and machines will disrupt 85 million jobs globally in medium and large businesses across 15 industries and 26 economies.
A short video produced by the WEF explains their prediction of what the future of jobs will look like.
Wells Fargo released their own study concluding that AI and robots will eliminate approximately 200,000 jobs in banking in the next decade.
Stock and bond traders are slowly being replaced by AI tools and that trend is only going in one direction.
In healthcare, AI tools will be used to perform more precise diagnosis decision making. AI is already much better at reading medical imaging (MRI, CTScan, Xray) than humans.
News organizations like CNET have already been using AI tools to write entire articles.
AI has already started to impact journalism in various ways, such as generating news articles, analyzing data, and fact-checking. However, while AI has the potential to automate some of the more routine aspects of journalism, such as basic news reporting and data analysis, it is unlikely to replace human journalists entirely.
Journalism is not just about providing information; it is about storytelling, contextualizing information, and offering analysis and perspective. These are skills that AI cannot replicate. Additionally, journalism requires human empathy and critical thinking, which are essential for accurately conveying the impact of events and issues on people's lives.
While AI can assist journalists by automating some aspects of their work, such as identifying patterns in data, it cannot replace the creative and human aspects of journalism. As such, while AI will undoubtedly continue to play a role in journalism, it is unlikely to replace journalists who write for a living entirely.
The entire block quote above about whether AI can replace journalists was written in approximately 3 seconds using chatgpt in response to this prompt:
Will AI replace journalists who write for a living?
So, apparently, the AI tool du jour does not believe it will replace journalists.
The Legal Domains and How AI Might Intervene
While no one reading this blog is likely to ever see an AI powered robot represent a client in court, there are many domains in which lawyers currently operate that AI is well designed to augment and perhaps replace the role of a lawyer. This is just a list of some of those domains.
Document review and analysis: AI can analyze legal documents, contracts, and other legal texts much faster and more accurately than humans, potentially eliminating the need for lawyers to perform this task.
Legal research: AI can assist lawyers in researching case law, statutes, and regulations, helping them to find relevant information much faster than traditional research methods.
Predictive analytics: AI can analyze large amounts of data and predict legal outcomes, such as the likelihood of a case winning or losing, which could reduce the need for lawyers to make these predictions themselves. This would increase the already high settlement and plea agreement rate of civil and criminal cases.
Document generation: AI can generate legal documents, such as contracts or agreements, based on specific criteria or information provided by a user, potentially reducing the need for lawyers to draft these documents from scratch.
Due diligence: AI can assist with due diligence tasks, such as reviewing contracts, financial statements, and other documents, which is often a time-consuming task for lawyers.
Client communication: AI-powered chatbots can communicate with clients, answering questions and providing legal advice, potentially reducing the need for lawyers to be involved in every interaction. While possibly a cost saver for clients, this role causes concern amongst lawyers and bar associations about the unauthorized practice of law.
Contract negotiation: AI can assist with contract negotiations by analyzing data, identifying patterns, and suggesting terms that are likely to be accepted by the other party.
One study by Deloitte estimates that 100,000 legal sector jobs will be automated in the next 20 years. You can download their report here. Other lawyers who are heading their firms are estimating that entire categories of legal work will be overtaken by AI. Stefanie Yuen Thio who helped manage an international law firm believe in 2019 that routine legal tasks that involve minimal professional oversight, are repetitive or based on templates, would likely be taken over by software in the near future.
Years ago a then college student created an AI-powered chatbot to automate the challenging of parking tickets for people who could not afford a lawyer. His free service, DoNotPay (featured in other articles on LegalAI.com) took on 250,000 cases and won 160,000 of them saving users more than $4 million in fines. At some point, a raft of such tools will emerge on websites, some not even based in the U.S., offering AI powered legal advice. The existence of such tools will challenge lawyers on their pricing structure and ability to capture clients. Will the unauthorized practice of law threats and litigation outcomes be enough to stem that tide?
Conclusion
As with so many other industries from blue collar to white collar, AI is going to change jobs, eliminate jobs and require workers in some jobs to upskill to keep pace. The legal industry is no different. Just like healthcare, accounting and perhaps architecture, the law will be impacted in all those ways by the application of AI tools. The advice for lawyers ought to be risk stratified. A lawyer nearing the end of their career is not as likely to be replaced by AI. New lawyers, however, would be wise to increase their tech skills to ensure their usefulness to firms, corporations and government. What skills? Well, one of them is learning how to write useful prompts for tools like ChatGPT. Yes, prompt engineering is now a thing. Learning how to maximize the value of these AI tools is something every new lawyer should master. The future is uncertain, but the advance of AI is a given.