Why Your Lawyer May Not Be Replaced By a Robot Anytime Soon Versus the Rise of Robolawyers

There is a debate in most professions about how soon many of the tasks they perform will be done by robots or algorithmic computerization. The law is no exception. The question is which vision of the future is likely to prevail quickest. JL

Jason Koebler reports in The Atlantic and Steve Lohr reports in the New York Times:

Advances in artificial intelligence may diminish (lawyers') role in the legal system or even replace them altogether (and) algorithms are changing how judges mete out punishments. We might see a completely automated and ever-present legal system that runs on sensors and preagreed contracts. (Or) "Software is changing how decisions are made, and it’s changing the profession. But  data-driven analysis technology is assisting human work rather than replacing it."

The Atlantic: Near the end of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, Dick the Butcher offers a simple plan to create chaos and help his band of outsiders ascend to the throne: “Let’s kill all the lawyers.” Though far from the Bard’s most beautiful turn of phrase, it is nonetheless one of his most enduring. All these years later, the law is still America’s most hated profession and one of the least trusted, whether you go by scientific studies or informal opinion polls.

Thankfully, no one’s out there systematically murdering lawyers. But advances in artificial intelligence may diminish their role in the legal system or even, in some cases, replace them altogether. Here’s what we stand to gain—and what we should fear—from these technologies.

1 | Handicapping Lawsuits

For years, artificial intelligence has been automating tasks—like combing through mountains of legal documents and highlighting keywords—that were once rites of passage for junior attorneys. The bots may soon function as quasi-employees. In the past year, more than 10 major law firms have “hired” Ross, a robotic attorney powered in part by IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence, to perform legal research. Ross is designed to approximate the experience of working with a human lawyer: It can understand questions asked in normal English and provide specific, analytic answers.Beyond helping prepare cases, AI could also predict how they’ll hold up in court. Lex Machina, a company owned by LexisNexis, offers what it calls “moneyball lawyering.” It applies natural-language processing to millions of court decisions to find trends that can be used to a law firm’s advantage. For instance, the software can determine which judges tend to favor plaintiffs, summarize the legal strategies of opposing lawyers based on their case histories, and determine the arguments most likely to convince specific judges. A Miami-based company called Premonition goes one step further and promises to predict the winner of a case before it even goes to court, based on statistical analyses of verdicts in similar cases. “Which attorneys win before which judges? Premonition knows,” the company says.
If you can predict the winners and losers of court cases, why not bet on them? A Silicon Valley start-up called Legalist offers “commercial litigation financing,” meaning it will pay a lawsuit’s fees and expenses if its algorithm determines that you have a good chance of winning, in exchange for a portion of any judgment in your favor. Critics fear that AI will be used to game the legal system by third-party investors hoping to make a buck.

2 | Chatbot Lawyers

Technologies like Ross and Lex Machina are intended to assist lawyers, but AI has also begun to replace them—at least in very straightforward areas of law. The most successful robolawyer yet was developed by a British teenager named Joshua Browder. Called DoNotPay, it’s a free parking-ticket-fighting chatbot that asks a series of questions about your case—Were the signs clearly marked? Were you parked illegally because of a medical emergency?—and generates a letter that can be filed with the appropriate agency. So far, the bot has helped more than 215,000 people beat traffic and parking tickets in London, New York, and Seattle. Browder recently added new functions—DoNotPay can now help people demand compensation from airlines for delayed flights and file paperwork for government housing assistance—and more are on the way.

WitthayaP / Shutterstock; Avvo; Flickr; StudioSmart; Vladimir Nikitin / Shutterstock

DoNotPay is just the beginning. Until we see a major, society-changing breakthrough in artificial intelligence, robolawyers won’t dispute the finer points of copyright law or write elegant legal briefs. But chatbots could be very useful in certain types of law. Deportation, bankruptcy, and divorce disputes, for instance, typically require navigating lengthy and confusing statutes that have been interpreted in thousands of previous decisions. Chatbots could eventually analyze most every possible exception, loophole, and historical case to determine the best path forward.

As AI develops, robolawyers could help address the vast unmet legal needs of the poor. Roland Vogl, the executive director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science, and Technology, says bots will become the main entry point into the legal system. “Every legal-aid group has to turn people away because there isn’t time to process all of the cases,” he says. “We’ll see cases that get navigated through an artificially intelligent computer system, and lawyers will only get involved when it’s really necessary.” A good analogy is TurboTax: If your taxes are straightforward, you use TurboTax; if they’re not, you get an accountant. The same will happen with law.

3 | Minority Report

We’ll probably never see a court-appointed robolawyer for a criminal case, but algorithms are changing how judges mete out punishments. In many states, judges use software called compas to help with setting bail and deciding whether to grant parole. The software uses information from a survey with more than 100 questions—covering things like a defendant’s gender, age, criminal history, and personal relationships—to predict whether he or she is a flight risk or likely to re-offend. The use of such software is troubling: Northpointe, the company that created compas, won’t make its algorithm public, which means defense attorneys can’t bring informed challenges against judges’ decisions. And a study by ProPublica found that compas appears to have a strong bias against black defendants.

Forecasting crime based on questionnaires could come to seem quaint. Criminologists are intrigued by the possibility of using genetics to predict criminal behavior, though even studying the subject presents ethical dilemmas. Meanwhile, brain scans are already being used in court to determine which violent criminals are likely to re-offend. We may be headed toward a future when our bodies alone can be used against us in the criminal-justice system—even before we fully understand the biases that could be hiding in these technologies.

4 | An Explosion of Lawsuits

Eventually, we may not need lawyers, judges, or even courtrooms to settle civil disputes. Ronald Collins, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law, has outlined a system for landlord–tenant disagreements. Because in many instances the facts are uncontested—whether you paid your rent on time, whether your landlord fixed the thermostat—and the legal codes are well defined, a good number of cases can be filed, tried, and adjudicated by software. Using an app or a chatbot, each party would complete a questionnaire about the facts of the case and submit digital evidence.
“Rather than hiring a lawyer and having your case sit on a docket for five weeks, you can have an email of adjudication in five minutes,” Collins told me. He believes the execution of wills, contracts, and divorces could likely be automated without significantly changing the outcome in the majority of cases.

There is a possible downside to lowering barriers to legal services, however: a future in which litigious types can dash off a few lawsuits while standing in line for a latte. Paul Ford, a programmer and writer, explores this idea of “nanolaw” in a short science-fiction story published on his website—lawsuits become a daily annoyance, popping up on your phone to be litigated with a few swipes of the finger.
Or we might see a completely automated and ever-present legal system that runs on sensors and pre-agreed-upon contracts. A company called Clause is creating “intelligent contracts” that can detect when a set of prearranged conditions are met (or broken). Though Clause deals primarily with industrial clients, other companies could soon bring the technology to consumers. For example, if you agree with your landlord to keep the temperature in your house between 68 and 72 degrees and you crank the thermostat to 74, an intelligent contract might automatically deduct a penalty from your bank account.
Experts say these contracts will increase in complexity. Perhaps one day, self-driving-car accident disputes will be resolved with checks of the vehicle’s logs and programming. Your grievance against the local pizza joint’s guarantee of a hot delivery in 10 minutes will be checked by a GPS sensor and a smart thermometer. 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.

The New York Times:

Impressive advances in artificial intelligence technology tailored for legal work have led some lawyers to worry that their profession may be Silicon Valley’s next victim.

But recent research and even the people working on the software meant to automate legal work say the adoption of A.I. in law firms will be a slow, task-by-task process. In other words, like it or not, a robot is not about to replace your lawyer. At least, not anytime soon.

“There is this popular view that if you can automate one piece of the work, the rest of the job is toast,” said Frank Levy, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s just not true, or only rarely the case.”

An artificial intelligence technique called natural language processing has proved useful in scanning and predicting what documents will be relevant to a case, for example. Yet other lawyers’ tasks, like advising clients, writing legal briefs, negotiating and appearing in court, seem beyond the reach of computerization, for a while.“Where the technology is going to be in three to five years is the really interesting question,” said Ben Allgrove, a partner at Baker McKenzie, a firm with 4,600 lawyers. “And the honest answer is we don’t know.”

Dana Remus, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, and Mr. Levy studied the automation threat to the work of lawyers at large law firms. Their paper concluded that putting all new legal technology in place immediately would result in an estimated 13 percent decline in lawyers’ hours.

A more realistic adoption rate would cut hours worked by lawyers by 2.5 percent annually over five years, the paper said. The research also suggests that basic document review has already been outsourced or automated at large law firms, with only 4 percent of lawyers’ time now spent on that task.

Their gradualist conclusion is echoed in broader research on jobs and technology. In January, the McKinsey Global Institute found that while nearly half of all tasks could be automated with current technology, only 5 percent of jobs could be entirely automated. Applying its definition of current technology — widely available or at least being tested in a lab — McKinsey estimates that 23 percent of a lawyer’s job can be automated.

Technology will unbundle aspects of legal work over the next decade or two rather than the next year or two, legal experts say. Highly paid lawyers will spend their time on work on the upper rungs of the legal task ladder. Other legal services will be performed by nonlawyers — the legal equivalent of nurse practitioners — or by technology.Corporate clients often are no longer willing to pay high hourly rates to law firms for junior lawyers to do routine work. Those tasks are already being automated and outsourced, both by the firms themselves and by outside suppliers like Axiom, Thomson Reuters, Elevate and the Big Four accounting firms.So the law firm partner of the future will be the leader of a team, “and more than one of the players will be a machine,” said Michael Mills, a lawyer and chief strategy officer of a legal technology start-up called Neota Logic.

Surprising Spread

The pace of technology improvement is notoriously unpredictable. For years, labor economists said routine work like a factory job could be reduced to a set of rules that could be computerized. They assumed that professionals, like lawyers, were safe because their work was wrapped in language.

But advances in artificial intelligence overturned that assumption. Technology unlocked the routine task of sifting through documents, looking for relevant passages.

So major law firms, sensing the long-term risk, are undertaking initiatives to understand the emerging technology and adapt and exploit it.

Dentons, a global law firm with more than 7,000 lawyers, established an innovation and venture arm, Nextlaw Labs, in 2015. Besides monitoring the latest technology, the unit has invested in seven legal technology start-ups.

“Our industry is being disrupted, and we should do some of that ourselves, not just be a victim of it,” John Fernandez, chief innovation officer of Dentons, said.

Last month, Baker McKenzie set up an innovation committee of senior partners to track emerging legal technology and set strategy. Artificial intelligence has stirred great interest, but law firms today are using it mainly in “search-and-find type tasks” in electronic discovery, due diligence and contract review, Mr. Allgrove said.More than 280 legal technology start-ups have raised $757 million since 2012, according to the research firm CB Insights.

At many of these start-ups, the progress is encouraging but measured, and each has typically focused on a specific area of law, like bankruptcy or patents, or on a certain legal task, like contract review. Their software learns over time, but only after it has been painstakingly trained by human experts.

When Alexander Hudek, a computer scientist whose résumé includes heavyweight research like working on the human genome project, turned to automating the review of legal contracts in 2011, he figured that he would tweak standard algorithms and that it would be a four-month job.

Instead, it took two and a half years to refine the software so it could readily identify concepts such as noncompete contract clauses and change-of-control, said Mr. Hudek, chief technology officer of Kira Systems.

The Kira program sharply winnows the number of documents read by people, but human scrutiny is still required.

Yet the efficiency gains can be striking. Kira’s clients report reducing the lawyer time required for contract review by 20 percent to 60 percent, said Noah Waisberg, chief executive of Kira.

In Miami, Luis Salazar, a partner in a five-lawyer firm, began using software from the start-up Ross Intelligence in November in his bankruptcy practice. Ask for the case most similar to the one you have and the Ross program, which taps some of IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence technology, reads through thousands of cases and delivers a ranked list of the most relevant ones, Mr. Salazar said.

Skeptical at first, he tested Ross against himself. After 10 hours of searching online legal databases, he found a case whose facts nearly mirrored the one he was working on. Ross found that case almost instantly.

Mr. Salazar has been particularly impressed by a legal memo service that Ross is developing. Type in a legal question and Ross replies a day later with a few paragraphs summarizing the answer and a two-page explanatory memo.The results, he said, are indistinguishable from a memo written by a lawyer. “That blew me away,” Mr. Salazar said. “It’s kind of scary. If it gets better, a lot of people could lose their jobs.”

Not yet. The system is pretty good at identifying the gist of questions and cases, but Ross is not much of a writer, said Jimoh Ovbiagele, the chief technology officer of Ross. Humans take the rough draft that Ross produces and create the final memos, which is why it takes a day.

The start-up’s engineers are trying to fully automate the memo-writing process, but Mr. Ovbiagele said, “We are a long way from there at this point.”

The Good Old Days

James Yoon, a lawyer in Palo Alto, Calif., recalls 1999 as the peak of the old way of lawyering. A big patent case then, he said, might have needed the labor of three partners, five associates and four paralegals.

Today, a comparable case would take one partner, two associates and one paralegal.

Two obvious factors have led to that downsizing: tightened legal spending and digital technologies that automated some tasks, like document searches, said Mr. Yoon, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

Mr. Yoon uses software tools like Lex Machina and Ravel Law to guide litigation strategy in his patent cases. These programs pore through court decisions and filing data to make profiles and predictions about judges and lawyers.

What are the chances a certain motion will be approved by a particular judge, based on all his or her past rulings? Does the opposing counsel go to trial often or usually settle cases?

Mr. Yoon compares what he does to the way baseball and football analysts assess the tendencies of players and coaches on other teams.The clever software, he said, is “changing how decisions are made, and it’s changing the profession.”But its impact on employment would seem to be far less than, say, electronic discovery. The data-driven analysis technology is assisting human work rather than replacing it. Indeed, the work that consumes most of Mr. Yoon’s time involves strategy, creativity, judgment and empathy — and those efforts cannot yet be automated.

Mr. Yoon, who is 49, stands as proof. In 1999, his billing rate was $400 an hour. Today, he bills at $1,100 an hour.

“For the time being, experience like mine is something people are willing to pay for,” Mr. Yoon said. “What clients don’t want to pay for is any routine work.”

But, he added, “the trouble is that technology makes more and more work routine.”