Contract Attorneys

Waving The White Flag To Our Robot Overlords

Will robots end document review as we know it?

By Alex Rich on December 03, 2014 10:17 am

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: some dire report predicting that technology will end the practice of law as we know it. This latest one has been making the rounds on my Facebook feed, and even the Gawker media site, io9 has picked it up. The report in question, by Jomati Consultants, even commits to a time frame — hypothesizing that robots and artificial intelligence will come to dominate the legal profession by 2030.

But maybe there are a few things to consider before we go waving the white flag at our new robot overlords.

Fundamentally, the threat is real. All sorts of white collar jobs are threatened by advancements in technology, and document review and other low-level legal work are first on the hit list. Document review is characterized by rote decisions and struggles to consistently be called “legal work.” And for document reviewers, the outlook predicted by the report is dismal. As Legal Futures notes:

The report’s focus on the future of work contained the most disturbing findings for lawyers. Its main proposition is that AI is already close in 2014. “It is no longer unrealistic to consider that workplace robots and their AI processing systems could reach the point of general production by 2030… after long incubation and experimentation, technology can suddenly race ahead at astonishing speed.”

By this time, ‘bots’ could be doing “low-level knowledge economy work” and soon much more. “Eventually each bot would be able to do the work of a dozen low-level associates. They would not get tired. They would not seek advancement. They would not ask for pay rises. Process legal work would rapidly descend in cost.”

But not so fast my friend. The extreme predictions offered by this latest report have a few flaws. No matter how many articles you read touting their benefits, predictive coding and technology-assisted review are still in their infancy. Law firms and clients are still getting used to the outsourcing of document review en masse to contract attorneys, and the savings from that switch helps to delay the urgency to test the first all-robot document review.

Also remember it was only a few years ago that Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck of the Southern District of New York approved the very first discovery protocol using predictive coding. And the technology isn’t a slam dunk: it can have substantial start up costs, and still requires humans (or just doc review monkeys) to code seed sets to “teach” the system. So, yes, easy responsiveness reviews may start to dwindle, but detailed privilege analysis is still a challenge to teach the AI.

And let’s not forget that lawyers are notorious luddites. I’m sure some of you are at firms that just made the switch from Windows XP and struggle with ATL’s new format on IE 8. The notion that the industry so reticent to update itself to the latest word processing program will make the switch to an industry dominated by robots — the Jomati report characterizes it as a “structural revolution, some might say a structural collapse” of the traditional law firm — within 15 years seems like a stretch.

While we are at it, let’s also take a look at this report. It’s authored by Jomati Consultants, which specializes in management consulting to the legal industry. According to their website, some of their areas of expertise include the following (emphasis added):

  • Market analysis and strategy development including domestic and international office and practice area development

  • Strategy implementation including acquisitions of teams, firm-level mergers and disposals of offices and practice areas

So a consultant that specializes in strategy surrounding the elimination of practice areas for law firms thinks that document review and low level legal work may soon be obsolete? Hmm… they may just have a dog in that hunt.

Alex Rich is a T14 grad and Biglaw refugee who has worked as a contract attorney for the last 7 years… and counting. If you have a story about the underbelly of the legal world known as contract work, email Alex at [email protected] and be sure to follow Alex on Twitter @AlexRichEsq