COVID-19 Pandemic is Rocking our Legal Profession

Lawyers need to Adapt

COVID-19 has abruptly brought our world to a screeching halt. We can all agree that the post-pandemic world will be different, and the legal practice will not be an exception.   As we continue to be apart and try to overcome the global pandemic, it’s easy to become despondent about what the future waves of the virus will wage upon us as we absorb the sobering fact that a majority of will catch the virus and thousands of people will die.

Lawyers – like everyone else dealing with the pandemic – cannot delude themselves into thinking this is a short-term problem.  The global pandemic will have a profound and lasting effect on the world and the practice. Rather than think about the grim statistics, we need to focus on the purpose of our practice and how to perform the work we have been trained to do.  We must stay safe, healthy, keep in touch with loved ones and – most importantly – look at the situation as an opportunity to modernize how we deliver services.

For several years I have been talking about using technology in the practice and adapting to the tsunami of changes tech is bringing to our society. We have ignored and resisted the technological changes that are changing the way we practice.

It is no longer enough to use e-filing, email, video conferencing, video-based court hearings, and e-signatures. We must move to the cloud, learn to work easily from home, adapt to video-based mediations, and get comfortable with remote teaching, and then we have to move further down the road of advancing the practice. There has to be a more serious approach and greater thought given to how we will be practicing law in the future.

This will require a complete change in paradigm of the practice.

  • The portion of society that solos and small firms service – the middle class – will be devastated by the pandemic. Already the stock market crash has taken about 25% of the retirement portfolio, over 4,000,000 people will be applying for unemployment, supply chains are being stretched to the limit, and a global recession is not far away.   So, who will be able to afford legal services?
    • We will have to work harder to get justice for the people most affected by the collapse of the economy.
    • More businesses will be going bankrupt.
    • More retail space will become vacant.
  • Embracing technology beyond Zoom and video conferencing and moving into collaborative technology.
  • Remote working, online courts, eLibraries, digital signatures, case management and knowledge management are now mandatory.
  • Increased use of electronically stored information (ESI).
  • Accepting artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, predictive analytics which have already disrupted the legal market.

And through this tsunami of effects, where will lawyers stand? Will we be sitting on the beach catching some rays as the tsunami overcomes us?  Will we be like the lobster who gets washed up onto a rock and refuses to move the several inches to the ocean to survive?

If we are the leaders that we profess to be, then let’s lead.  Let’s find some answers. Let’s propose new systems for helping solve legal problems and serving the community.  Or we can all become Uber drivers (at least until drivers are still needed)

There are lots of directions we can take individually and creative, innovative steps the bar can take, but whatever we do, we need to move now!  I don’t have all the answers, but I refuse to be drowned by the tsunami that has hit us.  We need to start be the leaders of society which lawyers have been recognized to be.

 

COVID-19 is affecting the Practice

This is an unsettling and chaotic period of no longer business-as-usual for every industry, and the legal practice is no exception.  While we are all trying to stay safe and relatively production, a tsunami of change is overwhelming us.

The Future is Now

Clio, one of the largest law firm management systems, published a survey of law firms to assess the impact of the Pandemic on the practice.

Generally, the report confirms what we have been experiencing first hand – that the practice has been significantly affected by social restrictions and we are seeing reduced client demands.  This is notwithstanding the ongoing need for legal services.  Here are some of the findings:

  • Law firms have seen a drastic deceleration in new matter creation. Since the start of 2020, the number of new legal matters being opened each week has decreased by more than 30% compared to a baseline average of weekly matters opened during the first five weeks of 2020. When compared to the brief increase at the end of February, the number of new weekly matters dropped a total of 40%.
  • 77% of law firms agree that their day-to-day operations have been significantly impacted by the pandemic.
  • Lawyers expressed widespread concern over the future success of their businesses and their ability to make ends meet. Much of this concern is likely due to the majority of firms having seen a drastic decrease in the number of people reaching out for legal services.
  • Legal professionals take the novel coronavirus outbreak seriously. Only 11% of legal professionals agree that social restrictions are an overreaction to the virus.  Additionally, 75% of legal professionals report higher levels of stress and anxiety.
  • 50% of legal professionals are more concerned for their financial future than for their personal health.
  • Lawyers are still essential but will need to adapt to client needs. Overall, public perception of lawyers remains significantly positive for lawyers among the general population.  77% see lawyers as an essential service.  However, many consumers also perceive barriers in terms of cost and the accessibility of legal services.
  • 38% of consumers agree that a remote hearing would negatively impact their case outcome.

The pandemic has exacerbated the issues that lawyers have been facing over the past two decades.  We can no longer play the ostrich and stick our heads in the sand.  We need to become proactive in adapting to the changes we are facing.   We must – in order to survive – re-imagine how we meet clients wherever they are located to deliver services that are professional and affordable.   Technology will only advance our goal of servicing our clients.

For a summary of the report go to: https://www.clio.com/resources/legal-trends/covid-impact/

For a full copy of the report go to: https://www.clio.com/resources/legal-trends/

 

AI and the Practice of Law

Technology is advancing at a rate that is increasing exponentially.   Other industries are moving faster to adopt tech into their business than the legal industry.   What was once fanciful is becoming real.  Self-driving cars are just one thing that comes to mind, but robotics is invading every industry.   And technology is being developed to take over legal tasks.

AI in the Legal Profession

Alternative Legal Service Providers (“ALSPs”) are popping up everywhere.   Large accounting firms are using tech to perform traditional legal services  23% of large law firms surveyed in a recent report by Thomson Reuters said that they had lost expected client business to one of the Big Four accounting firms.

This move to tech is best characterized by the increased use of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”).   Although difficult to define, AI is simply the ability of a computer program or a machine to think and learn and mimics human cognition.  It makes computers “smart” by working on their own without being encoded with commands.[1]    Best example is when IBM’s Watson beating a world chess champion in 1997 and won in Jeopardy in 2011.

With all of this in mind, the ABA Science and Technology Section submitted a report to the ABA House of Delegates earlier this year tried to address some of the questions presented by the use of artificial intelligence in the legal practice and the ethical issues presented by the use of AI in law firms.  Some of these uses include the use of predictive coding (“TAR”) in e-discovery, due diligence reviews, legal research and document review.  The Report stated:  “But while AI offers cutting-edge advantages and benefits, it also raises questions implicating professional ethics.”

The ABA adopted the following resolution after considering the Report:

“RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association urges courts and lawyers to address the emerging ethical and legal issues related to the usage of artificial intelligence (“AI”) in the practice of law including: (1) bias, explainability, and transparency of automated decisions made by AI; (2) ethical and beneficial usage of AI; and (3) controls and oversight of AI and the vendors that provide AI.”

The resolution is nothing more than a recognition of the issues confronting the organized bar going forward in the increasingly complex world where technology creates new issues that law needs to confront.   The legal profession must adapt to the changes that tech is bringing to the world.  Lawyers will face more issues as tech invades every aspect of our lives.

 

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[1] John McCarthy came up with the name “artificial intelligence” in 1955.  https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#/search

The Future of Law – Part 4: Our Robot Colleagues

Call it the rise of the robots.  The legal profession continues to be transformed by the use of artificial intelligence in new and innovative ways. New developments in the past five years alone stagger the mind as what would have sounded like science fiction not along ago continues to become reality, making the lives of lawyers easier but also forcing them to change how they do business if they want to survive and succeed.

Rewind to 2013, and you find Jay Leib and Dan Roth—who launched Discovery Cracker way back in 2000 to streamline discovery and make it electronic and searchable—birthing their then-new creation, NexLP.  For the past five years this company has used AI to analyze previously unstructured data and identify trends, using predictive coding to gauge, for example, the likely results of pending litigation based on past results.

Another entrepreneurial duo, Adam Nguyen and Ned Gannon, set into motion the Diligence Accelerator program from eBrevia to help lawyers handle the pressure from in-house counsel and other clients to cut costs. This AI-fueled software similarly extracts information from data as clients upload documents, search for information and download per their preferences. The program doesn’t just recognize words but notices common legal phrases and stores those in its “memory bank” for future use.

In 2015, Dentons, the world’s largest law firm, created an independent subsidiary called NextLaw Labs, which earned the firm distinction from The Financial Times as the most forward-thinking law firm of the year. The subsidiary’s advisory group picks through potentially disruptive ideas to find those most likely to succeed, among which has been Ross Intelligence, which uses IBM’s Watson cognitive computing to make reams of legal research instantly searchable via a request in plain English.

Another innovative law firm, Riverview Law in the United Kingdom, launched a virtual assistant called “Kim,” an acronym for knowledge, intelligence and meaning, which will use AI technology developed by the University of Liverpool and a U.S.-based data collection and management program called Clixlex, since renamed Kim Technologies.

And the U.K.-based Ravn Systems has used cognitive computing to build its Applied Cognitive Engine program, which also extracts information from data at high speed, pushing out the boundaries of what lawyers and law firms can accomplish in a short stretch of time. The company’s Contract Robot can do so with title deeds and other types of documents.

AI continues to blossom, and while many firms do not yet use it, the robots are clearly on the march. “You start with a number of documents and ask questions like what are the termination clauses,” Peter Wallqvist, CEO and co-founder of Ravn Systems, explained to the ABA Journal. “For example, there’s a telecommunications company that would tell us about documents they had to review. They told us how they had to go through 1,000 documents, which would take three people six months to complete. We can do that in a matter of days.”

As the Journal concluded, “That is the future. Maybe it’s not so scary after all.”

 

Future of the Law – Part 3: Meet LISA, the future of Law.

The term “Legal Intelligence Support Assistant” might sound like a fancy-pants way of referring to your paralegal, law library or perhaps secretary. When you shrink that term to the acronym LISA, you might be tempted to ask about LISA’s professional background or whether she’s a nice woman.

But this LISA is no woman, let alone a human.  “She” is an artificial intelligence solution who provides “expertise” in the automation of legal documents, reducing or replacing the need for human lawyers in representing either party to an agreement.    The National Law Journal sounded impressed with LISA, placing the technological innovation on its inaugural list of Legal AI Leaders, which highlighted 49 entrepreneurs and companies who the magazine believes represented the best available online AI tools and services.

Launched in April 2017, Robot Lawyer LISA has been used by students, academics, businesses of all varieties and sizes, general counsel and other legal users. The U.K.-based company and co-founder/CEO Chrissie Lightfoot have become part of the conversation about the future of legal services provision, particularly in the area of quality online legal advice and documents.

“I’ve always been driven to innovate and push the boundaries to make improvements related to new products and/or services with the focus on the customer or client at the center of everything,” Lightfoot told the online publication Womanthology. “No doubt this passion has been fueled by my interest in the future as I constantly question, “What’s next?”, “What’s possible?”, and “How are we going to get there?”

Based on the premise that 90 percent of the public cannot afford legal services, LISA brings together human and machine intelligence to enable to lay parties to put together a legally binding contract, making quality legal insight, guidance, support and advice both faster, more transparent, more affordable and more accessible—24/7/365 and around the world.    The LISA system first offered a non-disclosure/confidentiality agreement, and the company subsequently released a group of three property-related artificial intelligence tools: a commercial lease, a residential lease, and a lodger agreement. These have come in handy for everyone from professional service firms, to business associations, to property-related businesses as the letting or renting of property online continues to grow, Lightfoot says.

The AI system asks users a number of questions supported by information, know-how and experience from human lawyers who helped to create LISA. Users read and respond, and those answers lead the parties to a middle ground as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, while helping them navigate the nuances involved both legally and commercially, she says.

For example, a landlord might initiate a lease document using the LISA tool, and then the tenant can change the initial draft to make the lease 18 months instead of three years—or anything else two laypeople traditionally would negotiate, albeit traditionally with the help of two human lawyers. Instead, they get support, knowledge and intelligence from the system.

Ultimately, Lightfoot does not think AI will mean robots take over every task an attorney might handle. “AI and robots will continue to replace human jobs whilst augmenting others,” she told Womanthology. “If you do nothing, then you ought to be worried. However, as these human roles and skill-sets will variably shift, it is up to each and every one of us to reinvent ourselves and apply the skills that the machines cannot do, yet.”

 

Will Robots take over the Practice of Law?

Robots in the Practice of Law?

Nearly half of all jobs in the United States could be performed by robot employees within the next two decades, according to report by PwC, with the effects varying by industry and job category.  Artificial intelligence provides a rapid way to analyze data and identify trends, but AI currently offers little of the creative thinking or originality required in most areas of the law.

The use of AI in the law dates to 1999, when Jay Leib and Dan Roth created “Discovery Cracker,” a tool that helped lawyers manage electronic documents for litigation in an age when they increasingly were sifting through terabytes of data instead of mountains of paper. The pair later in 2013 created NexLP, which uses predictive coding—in which a computer searches documents for conceptual information (not just keyboards) to determine which ones are and are not useful to a case—to substantially reduce the time necessary for e-discovery.

Today, computers are processing information at about 10 times faster than the human brain and it is only a matter of time before computers are programmed to assess all of the other factors that go into a legal analysis.

Artificial intelligence in the legal realm has taken another step forward with the advent of IBM’s “ROSS,” touted as “the world’s first artificially intelligent attorney,” blending the voice technology of Apple’s Siri with the cognitive computer of its IBM sibling, Watson. ROSS can perform the preliminary document research needed for some cases in as little as 30 seconds.

“You ask your questions in plain English, as you would a colleague, and ROSS then reads through the entire body of law and returns a cited answer and topical readings for legislation, case law and secondary sources to get you up-to-speed quickly,” according to the website of Baker and Hostetler, which recently announced that ROSS has been “hired” to work alongside its 50 bankruptcy attorneys.

This has a number of both promising and cautionary implications for law firms and their small business clients:

  • Nearly 80 percent of Americans who currently need a lawyer cannot afford one, despite the massive number of attorneys in the U.S., but using ROSS should be able to lower costs since there will not be humans who bill hourly handling some preliminary research for cases and matters.
  • Attorneys who are currently out of work or under-employed could use AI to create a lower barrier of entry into the market by being able to offer more affordable options to their clients.
  • For now, ROSS is available only for bankruptcy and intellectual property law, and the price may be prohibitive for smaller to midsized firms.
  • The volume of work performed by AI could lead to job loss for some attorneys.
  • ROSS could level the playing field between firms of different sizes because it won’t matter as much whether a firm has one or 30 associates available to research a case.
  • Instead of leafing through dusty textbooks or clicking on hundreds of links looking for precedent or an obscure court ruling, human attorneys will be freed to focus specifically on a client’s needs and creative solutions to them as AI handles the grunt work.
  • ROSS keeps updating court rulings so that as a case is being worked on, attorneys will know about up-to-the-minute developments in the relevant area of law.
  • The technology not only narrows down results to the most relevant answers, but it translates those answers from legalese into something closer to plain English, making them more understandable for clients.

Given that artificial intelligence cannot at the present moment compete with humans in terms of creative thinking or originality, the effectiveness of a technology like ROSS in simply taking over an entire section of a law firm remains doubtful for now.

“We believe that emerging technologies like cognitive computing and other forms of machine learning can help enhance the services we deliver to our clients,” says the Chief Information Officer of the firm employing ROSS in its bankruptcy practice. “We have been using ROSS since the first days of its deployment, and we are proud to partner with a true leader in the industry as we continue to develop additional AI legal assistants.”

Artificial intelligence will continue to move forward in the legal world, although further implications going into the future remain unclear—including the impacts of robots on revelry and merriment at office holiday parties.

How should we plan to network or go to a Cubs game with ROSS?  Will ROSS ask to attend our office parties?

The Tortoise and The Lobster

The Legal Profession Is Losing the Technology Race Faster Than You Think

robo-lawyer The legal profession continues to move at its traditionally measured tempo even as the winds of change blow past us like a rocket plane passing a Piper Cub. Unlike the relentlessly unhurried tortoise of Aesop’s Fable fame, however, the established legal profession is not necessarily going to win the race in the end. In our tale, we may be more like a lobster tossed onto the rocks in the sun: too lethargic to move the few inches back to the water necessary to survive.

To some degree, it is the very nature of our legal training and traditions that keep us from competing aggressively in a modern business world that sometimes seems to morph every few minutes. Lawyers are taught to be risk averse from the beginning. Our education requires us to assess problems and recommend conservative solutions that pose minimal legal exposure both to our clients and ourselves. Furthermore, our primary business models are antiquated. The partnership form of ownership requires consensus, but unanimity and compromise requires time that we don’t have. And at an even more fundamental level, we have been institutionally isolated and virtually free from competition. Court rules, laws and regulations have created what once amounted to a monopoly on the practice of law, and now that monopoly is being eroded by commoditization of the practice by online services

These are among the reasons we have been so slow to adapt our business practices to the tech driven revolution that is defining virtually every aspect of civilization. While we dawdle, cyclical economic forces and globalization are putting downward pressure on the demand for lawyers in the United States and the fees we can charge for their professional services. Indeed, some employee benefit packages now include limited coverage for legal services, allowing insurance companies to negotiate legal fees in the same way they dictate costs for medical services.

But the most powerful force of all is the relentless march of technology, and this is where the legal profession has historically struggled to keep up. I’m not talking about office technology here: certainly we have adopted desktop publishing, accounting and communication tools as well as anyone.

What is stalking our profession (at least as we know it) is information and data technology that is rapidly approaching the level of artificial intelligence. Internet-deployed software and databases combined with astounding computing power have made many routine legal services more widely available at a cost significantly less than what lawyers have charged. Routine (but billable) tasks have been increasingly offshored to places with educated work forces but far lower labor costs. Increasingly advanced search engines provide instant support for paralegal staff in far off locales that compensates for lack of a law degree.

Yet we have not yet begun to feel the full impact of algorithm-driven legal services. We are now seeing the legal equivalent of Deep Blue computers analyzing massive amounts of data relevant to law cases and spitting out evaluations and opinions in the same way a team of lawyers has always done. The difference is the computer can analyze far more data, far faster and far cheaper. The computer’s assessment is then turned over to a team of lawyers who can apply their knowledge and experience to the case. At least for the time being.

I am using the present tense to describe this scenario, because it is happening now. There are now litigation consulting firms offering analytical services based on complex proprietary algorithms. They are helping big corporations assess strategies and litigation alternatives and eliminating a lot of lawyering positions in the process. As big firms dump personnel, those unemployed lawyers will become sole practitioners practicing out of their basements, which inexorably means more competition in a shrinking market.

Will all this lead us to a legal profession dominated by Robo Attorneys? Will cars really be self-driven within a decade? Will stores disappear as Amazon takes over the retail world? Will people inhabit a virtual reality dictated by their eyewear? These answers are unknown.

But beyond question there is a potentially hostile reality waiting for lawyers who have not faced the onslaught of technology and what it means for anyone resistant to innovation.

As technology catches up to the slow moving legal practice, our challenge will be to find out how we can apply technology to our practices and remain relevant to the public. There will be drastic changes – just as Richard Susskind in his two books The End of Lawyers and Tomorrow’s Lawyers has predicted– and the challenge to lawyers will be to find a way to survive and thrive in the new legal landscape. Each of us needs to move into the tech waters or – like the lobster in our story – remain stuck on the rock and perish. How each of us does that depends on your unique situation.