Great For Anyone In Need Of Cheap Legal Assistance But Bad For Tomorrow’s Attorneys – Robots Are Coming For The Lawyers
Elizabeth C. Tippett, University of Oregon and Charlotte Alexander, Georgia State University
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 ne...