Hisham Sarwar
With constant developments in technology, predictions of occupations that will be decimated by computers are on the rise. The lorry drivers, translators, and even shop assistants are under a threat from the rise of robots. But these are not the only one fearing their extinction, lawyers are tipped dooming too, CNBC reports.
According to CEO of the LawGeex, Noory Bechor, this is like the beginning of the beginning. With the advancement, the legal profession of lawyers is on the cusp of a transformation in which the platforms of the artificial intelligence will dramatically affect how the work gets done. The legal industry promises to increase efficiency along with saving client’s expenses by the increased automation. But there are also the chances that it will reduce employment in this sector as the technology takes over tasks that are currently being performed by humans.
“Legal, right now, I think is in the place that other industries were 10 and 15 years ago, like travel,” he said.
Replacing the labor work:
Bechor worked as a law lawyer at a large firm in Israel and his transition into an AI advocate came as a result of his own experience. He states that he performed a lot of drudge work for small companies, investors, as well as multinational companies and it seemed a lot mechanical at times. He considered it really hard to reinvent the reel each time when he was needed to create a contract every time. It was painful to work for crazy hours but that also made him realize that as he reviewed more contracts, he became better at his work. This convinced him that a significant part of the work could be automated. The LawGeex platform, according to Bechor, can take a new contract, read it, and can compare it on a database of the similar contracts that have been experienced previously. The platform can learn from each review and become better.
How well machines do their job?
The argument that how well machines could do better than the lawyers who have years of experience has been refuted quite a bit.
But the founder and managing member of NexLP, Jay Leib, states that since 1985, human beings are found as not very good at searching the keywords and it is a fallacy that human beings look at documents perfectly because they can miss things too. There are a lot of biological issues that can arise with human beings but they can’t happen to computers. Reed Smith, a big international law firm, tested the system with RAVN ACE and conducted a review of hundreds of pages and documents. The system compared the documents very favorable.
Large firm seeing the advantages of AI:
A legal research platform, ROSS Intelligence based on the IBM’s cognitive computing system Watson, is being used by numerous law firms around the world and includes Dentons, Latham, and Watkins.
Andrew Arruda, ROSS Intelligence’s CEO and co-founder, said his company “is working with lawyers from every type of organization — in-house, big, medium, small, solo [practitioners] — as well as law schools and bar associations.”
The system works with lawyers from every type of organization no matter how big, medium, or small it is. With the passage of times, more and more companies are going to demend that their firms use such technologies because they will be free from paying any fees. The time frame for this transformation is between 2020 and 2025.
The reports indicate that if AI solutions become persuasive, the law firms may cut staff. According to the Deloitte Insight report that was released in the year 2016, in the legal sector these reforms will take over in the next decade and will end up nearly 40% of the jobs.
But Bechor agrees that AI is not something that will happen in the next couple of years whereas Arruda of Ross Intelligence thinks that it will increase the total number of jobs in the legal profession.
