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phantom power

(25,966 posts)
Mon Jun 2, 2014, 07:05 PM Jun 2014

Think the lawyers are safe from the robots? Think again

s mechanization and outsourcing continue to take their toll on the economy, students and those in career transitions have been forced to scramble to careers requiring increasing amounts of higher education to escape the undertow. For many, this has meant going back to grad school or learning to code. For others, it has meant law school.

Because no one can outsource a lawyer, and a robot can't become a lawyer, right? Right?

Five key areas of law now face encroachment by this machine intelligence. Some invasions are imminent, and others more distant but no less likely. The area ripest for computational transformation is discovery. As a young lawyer, I spent lots of time rifling through documents to determine which were relevant to an opponent’s request for information. That was the tedious, if lucrative, lot of the junior litigation associate and an important profit center for the litigation group at a big firm. These days, “predictive coding” is removing that labor-intensive task from lawyers. In predictive coding, a small number of lawyers can swiftly sample a large set of documents and construct algorithms—with the help of computer technicians—to decide which documents are relevant. Computers can sort better than people because fatigue, boredom, and distraction reduce human accuracy, while machine intelligence works nonstop, with no lag in attention or need for caffeine or sleep.

“E-discovery” has already become the hottest new phenomenon in litigation. Job growth in this legal area, unlike most others, is strong. One graduate of Northwestern Law School now specializes in head-hunting for professionals who can strengthen law firms’ e-discovery capabilities. And courts now recognize that e-discovery can curb litigation costs and make justice more affordable. For instance, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which specializes in patent cases, has issued a standing order that encourages the use of e-discovery.

Private firms are also beginning to specialize in these sophisticated services. With a combination of computational and legal knowledge, they can innovate more readily than lawyers who are left to their own devices. Last year, Modus raised $10 million to continue its data-driven competition with law firms in e-discovery. Such innovation will render e-discovery more accurate and less expensive, making use of such methods routine.


This sort of thing is happening everywhere. Google has decimated the market for political writing as websites struggle for revenue and political organizations have turned to an email-and-petition based fundraising model to survive. The marketing research industry is in turmoil as big data crushes out many traditional research methods. Retail has long been suffering. Education is on the block.

And as artificial intelligence increases, most of those professional jobs everyone is scrambling toward will be gone, too. Or, if not gone completely, they will be glorified button-pushing jobs that pay 1/5 what they used to, which is the other major development in the economy. It's not so much that unemployment is rapidly increasing, but that there has been rapid destruction of industries and wages. The thing to watch in the broader economy is underemployment more than unemployment, as armies of trained professionals cobble together multiple income sources at far less pay.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/think-lawyers-are-safe-from-robots.html
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