Comment by bigstrat2003
3 days ago
I would say there's basically zero chance lawyers go out of a job. As soon as it looks like lawyers will be replaced by AI, the people who run the government (who are lawyers!) will pass laws to make it illegal to cut the human out of the loop.
This is likely to happen but would be disastrous. Our experience show that when you cannot afford a lawyer that using AI helps equal the battle field. You can self represent and use all the case history and laws that AI has searched for. We have been successful doing this in cases where we may have lost without the use of AI and gained some form of justice as a result. Even before AI became prevalent we found we got better results with researching manually than the free lawyers who did not care and seemed not to understand the law themselves. With AI the advantage is saving time. You can live your life without sending weeks working on it fully.
The only way they can make it illegal to take the human out of the loop is if they ban self representation. Otherwise people will do research with AI and just present their findings in court. But the free/cheap lawyers are actually so much worse.If laws prevent self representation we would increase the inequality even more.
There are licensing laws already protecting the lawyers whose names appear on motions and briefs, but not much protection for the junior lawyers who will be impacted most. Big law, like the fancy consultancies, was historically built like a pyramid, with an army of 1st-3rd year associates doing due diligence and document reviews. The bottom was cut out of that in the 2000s by offshoring and automation. AI is contributing to another wave, but not dropping off a cliff.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPLEGA
Oh, 100%. To clarify, the AI inference engine that the guy uses doesn't _replace_ lawyers, it's just used to answer the lawyer's questions and check for things like sneaky changes in contracts. Still impressive, though!