Will robots replace lawyers? Robots have worked in factories for years. They’re starting to do the driving for you. Now some people believe the next advance by artificial intelligence into the workplace will involve the legal profession.
But advancing into the workplace is not the same as replacing the people who work there. As Steve Lohr writes, big law firms are both investing in and testing artificial intelligence to do tasks like document searches and even some contract writing.
Recent research concluded that “putting all new legal technology in place immediately would result in an estimated 13% decline in lawyers’ hours.” A more realistic adoption rate would cut hours worked by lawyers by 2.5% annually over five years.
Could that slow down hiring? Absolutely. But artificial intelligence has a way to go before it has an effect similar to the transformation that basic digitization — spreadsheets, word processing software, online access to historical documents — brought to the legal community’s work force.
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