Many lawyers, possibly to help preserve their peace of mind, tend to underestimate the potential impact of AI on their practices. Professors Elizabeth C. Tippett and Charlotte Alexander have a key insight in their article Robots Are Coming for the Lawyers:
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.
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 need to completely automate a job to fundamentally change it. All you need to do is automate part of it.