As a legal technology columnist, I get asked to see a lot of tech demos. Some of the tech is great and some of it not so great, but one thing is for sure – it’s getting better, and it’s getting more pervasive. More people are using it, more clients are expecting it, and the technology is getting more useful. Lawyers can sometimes be behind the curve when it comes to technology adoption, so it’s not uncommon that our clients will be using things like OCR of documents and cloud storage and efax and electronic signatures before we do. Then, the questions come from the client of, “Why did you charge me a 2.8 for reviewing and analyzing the records to find Mr. X’s name if you could have OCR’ed it and run a text search? I’m marking that down to a 0.3.”
That’s not the scary thing, though. The scary thing is when clients say, “Why should I even pay you a 0.3 when I have an app that will draft my contract/will/purchase agreement/etc. for a $4.99 one-time purchase.” Now, if you’re reading this, you are probably a lawyer or a law student and you are immediately thinking of 100 reasons why your ability to pick the right form for your clients or pull templates of old contracts you’ve drafted and Frankenstein together a new document with some client-specific tweaks is better than anything a robot could do. Most of you are probably right. For now.
What are you going to do in seven to ten years when that is not true? From what I’ve seen, it’s coming. There is so much machine learning already going on in the background of so many popular apps that you use every day — you’d be surprised. Last week at the Adobe Max conference, we saw a preview of some of the machine-learning tools coming out over the next year, and it’s mindblowing what analytical tasks computers can already do. The truth is that some services are not meant to be billed out at $350 an hour, and if you perform a type of service that can be done by a machine, you will be obsolete.
I’ve previously written about how robots are not going to take over our jobs, and I stand by that analysis. That article ran on June 21, 2016, and less than a week later, one of the hottest trending topics on social media was a chatbot app that beat 160,000 traffic tickets. So, the truth is that robots are not coming to take our jobs, they are coming to revolutionize our jobs, and we can either get on board or become less relevant. There are certain aspects of legal work that robots will be great at (or are great at, if you are a traffic ticket robot). With other aspects of the legal profession, humans will have a monopoly for a little while longer.
Things That Robots Will Do Better Than Humans In Five Years
I think technology is going to replace legal research jobs. Not entirely, but it’s going to make the job so much easier that legal research will take a fraction of what it does now. We watch a video in one of my classes that I teach from 20 or 30 years ago of an associate who is researching an appellate brief and spends all night Shepardizing a case. Now, of course, we do this with a few mouse clicks. In ten years, law students will watch videos of how we did legal research back in 2016, and they will laugh.
A few weeks ago at the Academy for Private Practice in Philadelphia, we saw a new tool from Casetext that lets you drag and drop a brief into your browser window, and it will analyze the legal authorities you cite and let you know which cases and which statutes you are missing. Legal research is pretty mechanical. We already have tools in the ediscovery world that can tell you with fair accuracy whether one document out of a million is a hot document or an irrelevant document by reading a seed set of documents and “learning” what is important, and then instantly analyzing the rest of the documents to see if it can find anything relevant. What happens when we apply that to legal research, searching across millions of authorities, instead of millions of emails?
Other jobs, such as form-heavy jobs, and jobs that rely on using templates or recycling old language from other cases, are going to be less relevant as well. That’s how that chatbot beat all of those traffic tickets – by running through a simple questionnaire, and then mechanically applying the laws to facts.
So, How Do We Future-Proof Our Jobs?
I’m not saying these jobs are going to be obsolete. I’m saying that if these things take you 40 hours a week to do, soon it will be three hours a week, so you are not going to be able to rely on that type of work to keep you busy. Machines are going to do a worse job than humans at things like drafting a cross-examination outline, not because it’s complex, but because a cross-exam is not just about the “what” you deliver, it’s about the “how.” So, you can have a very fact-based cross exam, but you are not going to persuade anyone with it if it’s not delivered properly. Machines might be able to help suggest better interrogatories for us, but responding and applying the proper objections, or even more importantly, knowing which battles to fight, that’s going to be a decision made by humans for a long time.
So, the bottom line is that a lot of analysis and fact-finding will be done by machines, but the application is going to be done by humans. If you had dreams of being a traffic ticket lawyer one day, there’s still going to be that job in five or ten years, but a lot of that work is going to be taken up by machines.
Earlier: Are Robots Going to Take Our Legal Jobs?
Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner at the Law Office of Jeff Bennion. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of San Diego’s plaintiffs’ trial lawyers association, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego. He is also the Education Chair and Executive Committee member of the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section. He is a member of the Advisory Council and instructor at UCSD’s Litigation Technology Management program. His opinions are his own. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.
