[notahacker]

And it's ludicrously obvious how much extra potential work there is for legal contractors. Right now there are companies turning down revenue-generating opportunities because the time/cost of scrutinising proposed contract changes isn't worth it. Not to mention a huge number of agreements done on a "standard contract, no exceptions" basis for the same reasons. If automation allows these to be turned around in hours, for a fraction of the price, the variation and complexity in standard contracts is going to multiply exponentially.

Even if the process of checking the contracts is fully automated, there's still a role for an associate/paralegal level lawyer (overseeing many more contracts than their predecessors) to answer followup questions, because their clients aren't going to navigate through case law summaries to get a more thorough explanation of non-standard term 3.1b's applicability to their specific situation if they can still phone somebody with a law degree.

[chongli]

Standard contracts exist for a variety of reasons, time/cost being one of them. Another one I'd like to highlight is the principal-agent problem[0]. If, due to automation, contracts went up by orders of magnitude in complexity then clients would be exposed to a new set of risks with a legal basis that they do not understand. The question then is: are these new, inscrutable risks acceptable to a client? Perhaps not, unless they are already a very large business.

[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...