I've always had a great interest in the "legal industry"; first because of its complexity and second because of its inability to be quantified. My friend, who is now a very successful doctor in England, once said that "any faculty that doesn't deal with numbers is nothing but a place where students learn how to push the clouds" and Law School was one of them. What he meant by "pushing the clouds" was that doctors learn how to save lives, engineers learn how to build things and all others do is talk.
The irony is that the "law firm of the future" is now moving to the cloud. Go figure!
The first things I've learned about the Law were from the movies I've watched and the books I've read. In fiction, good always wins over evil. And because doing good and making a difference in the world always intrigued me, I've decided to go down that path.
Studying Law in 2003 was very different and interesting at the same time. Just imagine, Law School in a small European country, not too many people heard of. Law was taught and practiced in very different ways. Most students didn't have access to computers, except for the finals when you had to hand in a typed project. For that, you had to use a computer provided by the school, or go to an internet-cafe. I remember having to study from the law books used in Russian or Romania schools, just to make a complete outline because there were not enough books published in Moldova. Hours spent in the library, just looking for information, and sometimes having to translate it to prepare for the class.
Just a decade later, things were so much different. 2015 and Law School in New York felt like a New Age. Now, there was too much information one could take in, every single student walked into a class with a personal computer, some of the classes were streamed online and the Law School tests were also taken online. You could see and feel the big transformation and it was exciting. But, were we ready for it?
In his book, "Thinking Machines", Luke Dormehl talks about how "technology creates unemployment". Did this exciting technological revolution actually brought more unemployment? Was it the end or the beginning? The question now is, if technology will in fact bring more unemployment in the legal industry, what would be the job of a lawyer?
Artificial Intelligence enables machines to mimic perception, learning, problem-solving and decision making capabilities of the human mind. For decades, AI has been related to the human-like intelligence exhibited by the machine, computer or robot, as referred to in computer science. Today, it is a part of our day-to-day life. We can see how the use of smart devises had a significant impact on the legal industry. Because the legal jobs do not require manual labor, they are referred to as white-collar jobs. With time, the smart devises are getting better at carrying out tasks that involve cognitive labor, meaning that for the most part what are being replaced are our brains and not our bodies.
The industrial revolution determined many manual jobs to be replaced by the superior machines, but can the superior machines replace the smart people or are they irreplaceable? The truth is that AI has already made a great impact on the high-cognition professionals like lawyers. The automation of the legal work is already having a great impact, especially on the Junior Associates because some of the repetitive tasks, that were performed by the Associates are now done by the machines. One good example of that is e-discovery. In addition, e-platforms like LegalZoom and Wevorce use algorithms to guide customers through everything from drawing up contracts to filling for divorce. As a result, many law firms will not hire junior associates to do the job that can be done by a machine. Thus, we are exciting by the technological revolution and by the changes AI brings into the legal industry today, it all sounds very exciting, fun and new, but are we ready for this? Do we know what being a lawyer in the AI era will look like?