Skip to main content

Is the Legal Profession Dead?

 Will we witness the end of the legal profession in our days? With the advent of AI (Artificial Intelligence), there comes a serious challenge to this profession that celebrates its precision and logical arguments, almost always based on precedent. Let’s consider a few cases.

 It seems certain that future lawyers will bring an AI assistant into the courtroom. It will listen to all testimony, look for irregularities, signal objection events, point out exceptions (with references), and help deliver closing arguments. Do you agree?

The law office of the future will need no paralegals. AI will develop all the background knowledge the attorney of record needs. It will supply appropriate quotes with references. It will cite tangential issues, how they were decided, and accompanying arguments. The future law office will have no space for a law library – it being online in every office. Attorneys will dictate and AI will compose their letters in the correct legal language. The trusty legal secretary’s days may be diminished.*

Public defenders may see their roles decline as suspects may be interrogated by AI, their case summarized, and possibly an attorney assigned. However, the future accused may elect an AI-only attorney. (After all, AI can now pass the bar exam.)

Corporate AI lawyers will draft break-proof contracts. Civil AI lawyers will create break-proof wills. (Maybe they already do.) Accident AI lawyers will simply negotiate a settlement, the legalities fully developed by AI – for both sides.

Of course, the Supreme Court will be the biggest user of AI, as it reviews all litigant briefs and summarizes the case based on law, even for politics – as seem to be a feature of recent Supreme meanderings. Appeals courts may be completely replaced by AI – if only to remove bias.

There seems no business as vulnerable as the legal profession. Clearly, legal costs will be reduced from $-000’s per hour to pennies. Only the bias and need for bias of politicians may protect this vaunted profession.

But is the much-valued judge a victim of AI, as well? Most probably, as they mostly review technicalities, rule on objections, approve witnesses, and simply keep courtroom order.

*My mom was a legal secretary, upon which her boss greatly depended.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please Comment.

Popular posts from this blog

Human Simulation is Possible - by Humans

  Human Simulation: Agent-Based Modeling and the Computational Case for Our Reality   1.       Introduction In the essay, we introduce the notion that humanity could be a deliberate simulation based on an extremely simple single-celled organism, hardly anything more complex than that. This will allow an (apparently) new interpretation of the notion that humanity is simulated, but that there is no master engineer at a massive number of dials and switches, responsible for every twist and turn of our universe and lives. We begin with the notion that the universe exists and operates under its own laws. So, given the Earth [2] , when and where life first began, it was infused with a living agent, self-actualized, reproductive, and with other basic rules for its operations, interactions, and much of what single-celled organisms do today. The idea from this occurred some years back when writing code in ActionScript (formerly Flash), I was able to create...
2 comments
Read more

The Calculus of Ideas and Patterns

  Introduction. When dealing with ideas, patterns, intuition, and brainstorming, we need operations or rules not unlike those of arithmetic. The goal is not proof, a finished device, or a fait accompli , but rather a foundation for further investigation and study. In some cases, these operations may yield a proposition, that is, something capable of being proved. In this sense, they form a practical logic of intuition. The article concludes with a few select examples from a variety of venues. Setting. We are working with a given idea, problem, or project, or simply just thinking. Our aim is to discover pathways, patterns, or conceptual connections that may be useful. The following operations describe ways in which ideas and patterns can be generated, transformed, or refined. These also work toward understanding the imagination. Yet, this framework is distinguished from formal logic and proof. We are tempted to call them as “soft logic” because while nothing is proved, reasons...
Post a Comment
Read more

Freedom of Speech

  Think of freedom of speech as a living organism. Then think of what is required for it to survive. Coming to mind are a population agreeable to its constitution (its environment) and the institutions (its nutrients) that keep it healthy. Currently, many institutions, including some political parties, question unfettered freedom of speech and are working to deny it, claiming it is unhealthy for the body politic. Yes? No?
Post a Comment
Read more