The Atlantic has an article this month on the consumerization of legal AI. The TL;DR is that garden variety civil legal issues are amenable to automation and "bots will become the main entry point into the legal system." The prediction is that by 2025, bots will handle the majority of divorces, contract disputes, and deportation proceedings.
Let me say this: both my work and encounters with vendors give me a good vantage point. I've argued since the early-2000s about technology displacing lawyers and other professionals. It was interesting having someone tell me I wasn't that smart after I posted an image of a production scanner, never mind that I had been to trade shows and met offshoring companies that would handle its output.
At this point I don't care whether you go to law school or not. The main thing you should be aware is that it is now commercially viable to replace lawyers with artificial intelligence, with the technology moving inexorably down the legal food chain. Absent protectionist measures — there won't be any — the writing is on the wall.
The Team AAMPLE douchebag would say "Ya just gotta try really hard and believe in yourself!"
ReplyDeleteFrom Inside the Law School Scam
DeleteOnce again, we see how in legal academia something [AAMPLE] that sounds relatively innocuous in theory -- standardized tests have serious drawbacks, some people who score badly on the LSAT can still be competent lawyers, it's important to maintain "access" etc. etc. -- has been perverted into just another way of extracting money, coming and going, from naive, desperate people.
Scambloggers give power to law school by dwelling on it and making it an obsession. By talking about it all the time, power is given back to law school and the experiences that were supposed to be in the past. By thinking about the past and reliving it, you are bringing the past to the present. It's not healthy, and it makes you powerless.
DeleteActually, scambloggers are a bunch of bitter losers who should have studied harder and networked more. Stick to the party line.
Delete"Divorce papers will be prepared when your iPhone detects, through location tracking and text-message scanning, that you’ve been unfaithful. Your will could be executed as soon as your Fitbit detects that you’re dead....Hey, anything to avoid talking to a lawyer."
ReplyDeleteGreat article. I remember when my supervising attorney had a big sentencing hearing coming up and he wanted me to research how much punishment the judge meted out in similar cases. It was difficult trying to gather all the data, and I was billing for all of my research time. Imagine how much money can be saved by a computer program that produces the answer in a few seconds.
The takeaway for 0Ls: Go into tech, not law.