End of Lawyers

COVID-19 Pandemic is Rocking our Legal Profession

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.

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.

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.

___________________________________________

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

Future of the Practice – Part 5: Impact of Technology Like Watson Might Not Be So Elementary

Imagine attorneys had an assistant that could structure data, help firms maintain transparency through more accurate information, keep track of complex legal and regulatory issues, improve efficiency so firms can scale up their services, and help lawyers handle various forms of “disruptive” competition, without breaking a sweat?

Some believe that technology like IBM’s Watson will help provide such assistance, providing lawyers with the “permission” to think innovatively, help clarify what attorneys do day-to-day—without replacing them—bring about better organization of data, and in doing so be of particular benefit to tech-savvy younger lawyers.

Machine learning might have more of a disruptive impact on lawyers than other technologies because it’s closer to the core of what lawyers do than earlier advances like word processing, e-mail and the Internet. But will technology like Watson impact their core work, or just the way client data and legal work product are created and disseminated?

IBM describes Watson, with its ability to handle even clumsily stated “natural language” questions, as part of a next generation of computing that not only answers humans’ questions but provides insights they might not have considered in the first place, mirroring the human cognitive process of Observe, Interpret, Evaluate and Decide.

This helps law firms keep track of how their information is aggregated and disseminated, providing for additional transparency that can be useful to litigators or investigators. Such systems can be used to track and integrate legal and business rules. They can help understand a client’s complexity and give attorneys tools to help their legal work stay apace. And Watson-like systems can help them scale up and improve efficiency and work processes.

Watson can help lawyers think outside the box of what they do, but to gain efficiencies from this new paradigm they will need to rigorously reexamine the structure of legal knowledge, currently contained as it is in a byzantine network of statutes, regulations, how-to guides, policies, contracts and case law.

Legal reasoning always will be too informal to be validated by a computational system, but Watson will help throw into relief just how and when lawyers add value to a given set of circumstances, empower the types of younger lawyers at the bottom of the totem pole who embrace emerging technology, and help firms better manage data and information. Watson is likely to become a standard query model for professional knowledge, as Google is for web search.

Given that IBM has introduced Watson to the market as a service, with an open model of innovation that is likely to prompt different types of companies to use Watson in different ways, this is likely to create a wave of experimentation. This may prompt attorneys and law firms, perhaps somewhat uncharacteristically, to become early adopters of a new technology.

Although machine learning will have its tradeoffs like anything else, it could have profoundly positive consequences for the legal profession in helping it catch up with other fields in improving productivity, responding to complexity and becoming more transparent. But never fear, Watson will not take over our profession.

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.”

Future of the Practice – Part 1: Why So Much Non-Billable Time?

Clio’s “Legal Trends Report” tries to suss out what lawyers are doing, exactly

What happens to the nearly six hours per day that lawyers spend on non-billable tasks? Why can’t attorneys dedicate more of their time to billable work? How do they spend their time, anyway? The 2017 “Legal Trends Report” from Clio attempts to answer these questions and others that legal professionals are—or at least should be—asking themselves.

The report, based on a survey of nearly 3,000 legal professionals, finds that lawyers only spend 29 percent of an 8-hour work day, or about 2.3 hours, on billable tasks—and when factoring in realization and collection rates, firms reap only 1.6 hours of billable time.

Nearly half of their time, 48 percent, goes into office administration, billing, technology and collections. One-third of their non-billable time goes toward business development, which means they’re constantly making sure they develop new clients, and 41 percent would spend even more time on business development if they could, the Clio report says.

More than half of law firms (54 percent) actively advertise their services to earn new clients, yet the overwhelming majority can neither calculate their return on investment in advertising (91 percent), nor know how much it costs them to acquire a new client (94 percent).

How can law firms improve their client acquisition? Clio also surveyed more than 2,000 consumers to find out what they want in a lawyer, and what influences their decisions on which firm to hire for a given case or matter.

Personal referrals from friends and family were by far the most frequently used search method (62 percent), while referrals from other lawyers (31 percent), online searches (37 percent) and directory listings (28 percent) were also relatively common. Advertising has a much lower influence, whether television (13 percent), online (13 percent), radio (7 percent) or billboards (6 percent).

Communication and pricing were top of mind for consumers in deciding which attorney or firm to hire. Responding to phone or e-mail right away (67 percent) and free initial consultations (64 percent) were the most sought-after qualities, Clio found.

Fixed fees (47 percent), accepting credit cards (28 percent) and being willing to exchange text messages (27 percent) were other common desires. Although online search was common, the snazziness of the firm’s website influenced only 19 percent of respondents.

The “Legal Trends Report” also contained figures on average billable hour rates. The average law firm rate is $240 overall, $260 for lawyers and $149 for non-lawyers. The average Chicago firm charges $312 per hour, third-highest among the 10 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, behind only New York and Los Angeles.

Yet the survey data shows that many firms don’t have set targets for how much they plan to earn in a given year, nor case by case. Slightly more than half (54 percent) could estimate their annual billings, half can bill a case based on a set budget, and less than half (40 percent) of firms that track time have hourly billing budgets.

Clearly, many of these respondents need to get a better handle on what they need to make, how they plan to do it, and then how to rejigger their time to be able to bill for a higher percentage of their time … or their own personal trends won’t be headed in the right direction.

Should I become a Lawyer?

Should I become a lawyer? Or are lawyers themselves becoming extinct?

The first question is one that I have been struggling with. The second question is one that George Bellas asked me when I began working for him this past summer.

I first met George a few years ago at a “business” lunch with my father and my grandfather. I usually work with my family during the summers and these one to two hour lunches were common. There was business discussed but not for that entire time. At the end of this particular meal, George paid. I was astounded. Usually during these types of lunches, we would pay. When I brought this up, my father laughed. He explained to me that our lunch would show up on an invoice down the line anyhow.[1] And that’s how I was introduced to the beauty of billable hours.

During this lunch, the conversation drifted to my plans after I finished school. For background, I am an Economics and Drama major at a small liberal arts school in Ohio. I have a passion for my Drama major but an even higher passion for living comfortably. I didn’t love Economics but it was nice having some background in useful skills. However, I made up my mind that I wasn’t going into banking. My father, a lawyer who has no clients, suggested law school to me so I told George that maybe law School was the next step.

Without missing a beat, George told me, “No – don’t go to law school no matter what you do. Don’t become a lawyer whatever you do. Run the other way!” George explained to me that he believes lawyers are an endangered species. According to George, in 25 years 99% of Lawyers would be irrelevant. What will happen is that two people would submit documents to a computer, the computer will run the data and spit out an answer on the ruling. I brushed this off because obviously this man with over 40 years of legal experience couldn’t possibly know what he’s talking about.

And so this summer came, and instead of working with my dad, I decided that if I was serious about law school then I need to work in a law office. George graciously offered me a position filling in for his legal assistant during the month that she was gone. On my first day, George gave me the same spiel.

“I’m going to convince you to not become a lawyer this summer” George explained. He also asked me why I wanted to become a lawyer, a question to which I didn’t have a good answer.

He then reminded me that the world of law is becoming extinct, computers will take over etc. This time I didn’t brush him off. Instead, I put both of my majors to use this summer in tackling George’s question to me and his claims about the profession of law.

Now, with less than two weeks before I return to school and about month until I take the LSAT, I have answers to both George’s claims and his question.

So, is the profession of Lawyer extinct? Short answer: no. Long answer: well, as it currently exists, yes. Putting on my economist cap, I looked at the effect that technology has had on certain professions. Take, for example, people who work in transportation. Before the invention of the engine, those who worked in transportation rode horses. Then the car was invented. What happened to those in transportation? They still worked in transportation but they drove cars instead of riding horses. I believe the same will prove to for the legal profession.

I had to learn a hard lesson about lawyers my first week, one that I knew deep down but never wanted to admit: Law is boring. For every “Objection!” yelled in court, there are hours and hours of reading, filing, re-filing and re-reading. I learned this because George had me do all that boring stuff. And this is where I got to thinking about how the profession will change, and if it will go away. While writing and re-writing briefs and motions and then filing and re-filing those same motions, I thought about how hard it must have been before electronic filing. You must have had to go to the court to file something, wait to hear if it was rejected, and once it was, re-write and go back to the court. That sounds awful and inefficient.

The same holds true for the research phase of a case. Before there were computers and legal search engines, you had to go to a library and spend hours looking for one document that could help. Now, from the comfort of your desk, you can type in the keywords you’re looking for and the computer will give you a whole bunch of documents that could be relevant. This system is not perfected, I’m not sure it’s really that available in the first place, but I can foresee it happening in the future. The car in function was the horse, just more efficient. And the people driving it remained the same.

So do I think the profession is going extinct? No. I think it is going to become better, honestly. You can accomplish so much more in such shorter periods of time. There will be less lawyers required, but, a person still has to tell the computers what to do. The computers won’t do all the work of lawyering themselves. Down the line, there will be self-driving cars but for many years people won’t trust a self-driving car to drive them just as people won’t trust a computer to handle their private and legal matters.

This brings me to the next question: why do I want to become a lawyer? People may start trusting self-driving cars but there is something human about being a lawyer. It requires one on one time taken to understand how and why someone did something. A computer can do the what but not the why. And it never will.

It is the same reason why I didn’t want to become a banker, why I approached law in the first place. I didn’t want to be a faceless cog making someone somewhere else richer. I want to do something that I can feel like I did. If that means a small claims case over $200 (in which the filing fees ended up being more than the claim being sued for itself), then so be it. I can rest easier knowing that I helped someone I know make $200 than someone I don’t know make $10,000.

This summer, the thing that I loved most was talking to potential clients. It is a classic paralegal task, but I reveled in receiving an email about calling a new potential client. Most of the time, they wanted someone to talk to, and I was that someone. I remember one specific incident, a person was concerned about losing their job. I assured them that I couldn’t do anything for them, just pass along their situation to one of the attorneys, but this person still thanked me for helping them. They explained that just having me listen, hearing their side of the story, was help alone. And after that phone call, I felt like I actually did something that morning. Even when a motion I filed got approved, I felt good knowing I was the one who got it approved.

I have friends with very impressive internships this summer with brand names you would recognize, and yet their work will never see the light of day. Even though these internships look great on paper, I couldn’t help but think that they really didn’t accomplish anything this summer. And I feel like I did.

Granted, years down the line I will probably advise a bright eyed kid like myself to run away, but for now I’m going to give this lawyering thing a try.

~ Jacob Skolnik, Future Lawyer

[1] BTW – George did not bill for that meal.

Will Robots take over the Practice of Law?

George Bellas, Lawyer — 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?

Is the Future of the Practice of Law in Jeopardy?

Is the Future of the Practice of Law in Jeopardy?

Technology is affecting every part of our lives and the legal world is not immune to the changing world. The practice of law as we know it will be unrecognizable in the next decade. Technology is the biggest threat to the legal paradigm as it currently exists. The legal establishment is complacent and unwilling to accept its ebbing grip on the legal market.

The recent ISBA report regarding the future legal practice[1] world severely underestimates the cataclysmic, exponential changes technology will have on the paradigm of legal practice. The legal community has turned a blind eye to technological tsunami hitting our society and affecting inside and outside the legal profession for years, even now disregarding its most potent threat staring it in the face. In their current state, the framework of law firms and schools are sorely underprepared to deal with the tsunami of technological changes and the non-legal alternatives it has created.

Within the lifetime of this year’s newly sworn attorneys, automation will radically change the legal profession. This may sound extreme, but once the dots are connected, anyone can see the domino effect on the legal structure. For instance, self-driving cars are a not-so-distant reality. The idea of not having to drive yourself to the office seems like a dream, but in reality it will dramatically change the practice. If vehicles are completely controlled by a computer, human error will be removed from driving, resulting in near eradication of accidents. Of course, accidents will occur, even with autonomous cars. However, when these accidents occur, will lawyers have the technological competence to interpret the computers that drive the vehicles? Accidents involving autonomous cars will create a plethora of new legal issues and standards lawyers must be prepared to address.

In 2005 alone, 35% of the 26,950 civil cases that reached disposition stemmed from motor vehicle collisions across the nation.[2] This seems insignificant, until compared to the 7.4 million civil cases filed around the nation in the same year.[3] If the claims filed are representative of the cases that reached disposition, roughly 2.5 million claims caused by motor vehicles reached an out of court resolution, settlement or otherwise. The harsh reality is that accidents create work for attorneys. Although the shift to autonomous cars will be gradual, it is obvious the lawsuits arising from accidents will decrease towards non-existence.

Autonomous cars will cripple the existence of solo-practitioners and big law firms alike. With lack of accidents, the need for auto insurance will become obsolete. The purpose of auto insurance is to cover the driver from any damages they may cause while operating a vehicle. If vehicles are operated by computers, the driver has no liability, and no reason to purchase auto insurance. If auto insurance is no longer needed, auto insurance companies’ revenue will plummet. These companies will either adapt to the change, providing coverage for self-driving vehicles at a highly-reduced rate, or cease to exist. Regardless, there is one clear outcome for attorneys employed by insurance companies: their jobs are in jeopardy. With less income, insurance companies will be less willing to employ big law firms for representation. Insurance companies may not be able to afford in-house counsel, eliminating the position entirely.

A decrease in accidents will also cause a decrease of injuries requiring hospitalization. When there are less patients in the hospital, one can assume a proportional reduction of medical malpractice claims will occur. Just like the insurance industry, attorneys on either side of medical malpractice claims will suffer from technological advances.

The effect of automation is not limited to the civil arena. Cars that are self-driving cannot violate traffic laws, notwithstanding maintenance issues such as a dead brake light. A computer cannot be inebriated, which will virtually eliminate DUIs. Additionally, if there are no traffic violations, there will be less arrest resulting from routine traffic stops, lowering the case load of public defenders, and in turn, reducing the amount of employed public defenders. Fewer accidents means less work for au
to body shops and a change in the auto insurance business.

Is technology really a threat?

Non-legal for-profit companies like LegalZoom and Avvo have been around for decades. These businesses provide do-it-yourself guides for a variety of legal actions, easily accessible and competitively priced. By paying a small fee, LegalZoom provides its customers with questionnaires, using the answer to fill out and file the required legal forms for the requested service. Additionally, it provides a year of unlimited attorney consultations, with an option to keep these services for a monthly fee. Recognizing consumers desire convenience and price transparency, LegalZoom assisted 1 million customers in the first 10 years of its creation in 2001. Since then, LegalZoom has assisted another 2.5 million customers in 7 years, and that number will only continue to grow in the state of the current legal paradigm. This flat-fee pricing is arguably the biggest draw to these types of technological services.

Unfortunately, these for-profit companies are not the only threat to the legal community. In New York and London, DoNotPay.co.uk assists users with a “robot-lawyer” chatbot. Through a series of questions, the chatbot determines if an appeal is possible, and if so, guides users through the appeal process. In the 21 months from it’s creation, DoNotPay has taken on 250,000 cases, winning 160,000, giving the program a 64% success rate. This sophisticated program, which provides a simple process for appeals, was created by 19-year-old college student. An individual with no legal training created a simple step-by-step online guide to traffic tickets. This traffic ticket “robot” gives a clear warning to the legal field: Adapt or Die. The reason these services are such a threat to the legal community is their pricing. These easily accessible sites provide flat fees and a well-defined service. Customers know the exact price for what they are paying.

The opposite is known for the legal field where the adage “a lawyer’s stock in trade is his time” has governed our fee structure since Abraham Lincoln rode the circuit in the 1850’s. Lawyers need to bill hours to make money, and thus strive to have more hours at the expense of efficiency. This common knowledge, combined with a general public lawyer stigma, causes consumers to be uncomfortable not knowing the actual price of legal counsel until a matter is resolved. The billable-hour mentality prevents law firms from adapting to the changes of technology. Sacrificing efficiency for profit is hurting the legal field. Lawyers have known that technology can threaten the practice since the early 2000’s. It was possible for a firm to automate a 65 page lease template, which generated leases in a mere 15 minutes, as opposed to the 4 hours it would take to generate manually. The project was scrapped because based on the billable-hour model, the revenue expectations would be cut in half.[4] By refusing to incorporate this technology, lawyers are willingly losing clients to non-legal companies.

Technology is leading to the downfall of the billable hours framework and is establishing a flat-fee structure. Technology will automate or replace many of the traditional, billable functions performed by lawyers. Some technology has become accepted within the legal field, particularly with document review and e-discovery. With globalization of work, work usually done by junior associate and paralegals is being outsourced to companies in different countries for a fraction of the cost.

Is the legal job market still stagnant?

The legal field has yet to recover from the Great Recession in 2008, nearly a decade later. Due to the escalating need for sophisticated legal representation prior to 2008, legal firms structured themselves to handle prodigious amounts of work while simultaneously training sophisticate business lawyers. Post 2008, the need for representation plummeted, and firms have attempted to adapt, “reducing the number or entry-level lawyers, turning the traditional pyramid structure into a diamond with many senior associates and nonequity partners composing the broad middle.” Unfortunately, “the short-term needs of established law firms to generate higher revenue and profits to retain the firms’ biggest rainmakers are at odds with long-term needs to invest in a more sustainable business model tied to the changing demands of its clients.” [5]While the industry attempts to shed the training costs of entry-level lawyers, it will eventually produce as shortage of mid level attorneys and higher labor costs to stave off unwanted attrition.

Despite law school enrollment and graduate numbers falling, the available jobs for new attorneys has decreased. Law school enrollment in 2016 has decreased from 5% from the class of 2015. The graduating class of 2016 dropped 9.2% from the previous years numbers. In addition, so did the number of entry level legal jobs, dropping 8.6%. Although the ABA reports a climbing employment rate of 86.7% for the classes of 2014 and 2015, only 62.4% of 2015 graduates and 64.1% of 2014 graduates obtained employment that required Bar passage.[6] [7] For those 83,816 graduates, only 53,000 were employed in positions that requires passage of a bar exam.

The 2014 OOH predicted 74,800 new lawyer jobs through 2022. Between 2014 and 2024, the agency now estimates, the number of lawyer positions will grow from 778,700 to 822,500, adding just 43,800 jobs—a plunge of 41 percent. [8]

Although the disproportionate number of entry level jobs to recent graduates has been known for years, the disproportionality will only increase with incorporation of technology into the legal practice. New legal technology will equivalently decimate the work load of entry level associate positions, document drafting and reviewing used to hone their skills will be outsourced to third parties or technology. Although this will bring down the cost to consumers and increase efficiency, it will lower total billable hours available and drive down profits.

Are law schools preparing lawyers for the future?

In addition to the radically changing legal field caused by technology, law schools are stifling the job market. Law schools have become cash cows, churning out inexperienced lawyers with crippling student loans who are as effective as a paralegal after graduation.

Foremost is the weight of the student debt most law school graduates incur. Ten years ago, law school cost half the amount it does now.[9] Historically, law school tuition has doubled every 10 years, roughly three times the rate of inflation. But this is not limited to law school, because newly admitted law school students are most likely carrying over debt from undergraduate colleges which are facing the same problem. It is not unheard of for a law school student to graduate with $250,000 of debt, a great place to start in a struggling job market.

Further, law schools do not adequately train their students in a variety of aspects that are necessary to provide effective legal representation. Law students are not required to take courses that teach marketing or business, nor are students required to learn about practical legal practice. Most law students don’t know how to properly fill out and file motions in court, some have never even stepped foot in a court room. In order to gain this legal experience through law school, a student must take specific courses, sacrificing opportunities to study other areas of law. Unfortunately, most students don’t even realize they need this practical knowledge until they have graduated. Additionally, courses on how to market yourself or run a business, which is essentially what an attorney does, are almost non-existent.

Of course, law students may be able to gain some practical knowledge through legal externships, but many times the work is limited to drafting, document review, and research. However, many an externship can consist of busy work, filing papers in an office. Although these externships can help students gain practical experience, they must seek out these positions themselves. Law schools do little more than provide information on where these externships may be sought. Compare this placement to other professional education. Medical students must participate in residencies where they hone their skills before beginning practice on their own. Speech-language pathologists, or SLP, are required to participate in at least 9 months of medical “placements,” working with patients under the supervision of licensed therapists. Specifically, in the SLP field, the schools assign each each student placement facilities. In these fields, this practical training is required before you can receive a license to practice. Although relatively inexperienced, this practical knowledge allows these students to have a level of competency before receiving licensure. In the legal field there is no such requirement, many young attorneys learn on a trial-by-fire basis. These student’s laughable experience, combined with a dismal job market, does not bode well for those who seek to practice in the legal field.

Technology is changing the legal paradigm and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. Throughout history, technology has been adapted to innumerable industries, changing them entirely. In the not so distant past, vehicle manufacturing was entirely changed by automation. Technology decreased the labor costs by replacing humans with technology, making cars more affordable to consumers. Today, technology is threating threatening the legal market in the same way. This is not speculation; todays business giants are warning of the effect of technology. Bill Gates, Mark Cuban and Elon Musk have recently warned of the impending displacement of human jobs from automation. But don’t take their word for it, just ask your travel agent how their business survived technological advances.

In Summary:

The ISBA Report recognizes some of these issues, but instead of helping lawyers deal with the changing landscape, the report focuses on providing legal services to the mass of people who do not have access to legal services. We need to start taking care of our own. We are a trade association with selfish interests. Lawyers must showcase the value of legal expertise, differentiating ourselves from do-it-yourself websites. As as the legal paradigm shifts towards speed and efficiency, we must address the inherent clash of the billable-hour framework with the forced efficiency of technology. To insure the existence and profitability of the legal practice, we must adapt to survive.

~ George S. Bellas (www.attorneyscreativeroundtable.com)

[1] https://www.isba.org/ibj/2017/01/seeingandshapingthefuture

[2] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/cbjtsc05.txt

[3] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/cbjtsc05.txt

[4] http://www.americanbar.org/publications/gp_solo/2014/may_june/how_technology_changing_practice_law.html

[5] http://www.americanbar.org/publications/gp_solo/2014/may_june/how_technology_changing_ practice_law.html

[6]http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/reports/2015_law_graduate_employment_data.authcheckdam.pdf

[7] http://www.nalp.org/1216research#table1

[8] http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/01/government-cuts-projection-of-2014-2024-lawyer-jobs-by-41-16k-lawyer-jobs-for-37k-law-grads-each-yea.html

[9] http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/statistics/ls_tuition.authcheckdam.pdf