|
> "I strongly believe that law students and junior lawyers need to understand these AI tools, and other technologies, that will help make them better lawyers and shape future legal practice," Buell told Mashable in an email. I am a law student and that is not what is going through my head. What I see is a tougher job market, justifiably. Understanding, and more importantly, developing legal tech will help me make to be a better lawyer; since I am not already on top of the food chain, we (as graduates) will be eaten away. Also: it is important to keep in mind that this is strictly contract law. Criminal and maybe to some extent tort law will be in the hands of real people for some foreseeable time, at least in regards to representation. Representation must not be strictly seen in a legal manner. As a lawyer you are also a fellow human with emotions, who must weigh pros and cons specifically adapted to your client. And that, right now, is a human thing only. Research and drafting documents - that I believe will also be dominated by AI. Simply because economies of scale and cost/effectiveness ratio. |
My wife was a law firm junior associate in the banking law group of a major firm during the S&L crisis. She spent a lot of time on the due diligence work involved in merging sick S&L's into each other. I suspect that if faced with a similar Augean stable, having auto-summarization and auto-triage would be a hugely beneficial. True, need for fewer junior associates since they are looking only at exception documents and otherwise tuning the "queries", for lack of a better term. But I think it would help even out the work load and the net impact is a healthier organizational structure. (That experience made her rethink her career path, she ended up in corporate practice doing software licensing.)
In the area of patent law, claims have a very regular structure and I think their analysis would yield to analysis given the current state of machine learning. Given the stakes involved, it seems to me that automated claims checking and claims analysis would help everyone. Patent firms could produced better work product in less time. There is no great surplus of patent attorneys, and given the time and cost constraints, many companies pursuing patents tend to establish a budget and attack patents in priority order until the budget is gone. I don't think patent firms will end up billing any less in total, but simply bill the same for more patents each completed for less money. As a small-time inventor, this would be good, because if you only want one patent, you see your costs reduced.