Robots are coming for the lawyers, as they have come for many other sectors of the economy, according to a recent article. While many once feared that total automation of certain legal tasks would result in job losses for lawyers, partial automation may be transformative enough to effect significant changes in the composition of legal teams. So, are you targeted for termination? The answer will continue to evolve, as the same tools that provide automation in whole or in part can also free up lawyers to handle higher-level tasks and increase overall efficiency at the same time. Certainly some of the legal automation trends happening today were already anticipated many years ago, but time will tell how far and how wide artificial intelligence and machine learning will penetrate into the legal industry. If there is to be a robot apocalypse that radically transforms the legal industry, humanoid lawyers must prepare for co-existence which hopefully will be peaceful.
“Imagine what a lawyer does on a given day: researching cases, drafting briefs, advising clients. While technology has been nibbling around the edges of the legal profession for some time, it’s hard to imagine those complex tasks being done by a robot. And it is those complicated, personalized tasks that have led technologists to include lawyers in a broader category of jobs that are considered pretty safe from a future of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. But, as we discovered in a recent research collaboration to analyze legal briefs using a branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, lawyers’ jobs are a lot less safe than we thought. It turns out that you don’t need to completely automate a job to fundamentally change it. All you need to do is automate part of it.”
Read: Robots are coming for the lawyers at FastCompany