blog




  • Essay / Artificial Intelligence and the Legal Profession

    Technologies that can automate typical legal tasks, such as conducting case research or creating standard contracts, have been around for some time, but have not not yet been fully integrated into practice. . However, over the past decade, pressure on lawyers and law firms to reduce their fees has increased, leading to a more favorable attitude towards legal technology in the aim of increasing the efficiency of the entire profession. Second, pressure to improve access to justice by reducing financial and structural barriers affecting disadvantaged groups has led to the development of several online or otherwise accessible legal technologies. Third, as the capabilities of computers increase to include higher-level processes, the possibilities for their integration into the legal domain also increase. While previous legal technologies threatened to primarily replace office work, artificial intelligence could threaten to replace lawyers themselves. To gain a comprehensive understanding of this topic, it is necessary to explore the current state of artificial intelligence in the legal profession, its impact on the demand for legal workforce, and how the regulatory structures of the profession are tied to the trajectory of legal technology.Say no. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"?Get the original essayThe term "artificial intelligence" describes how computers can perform tasks that might generally be considered to require a certain level of intelligence human. These tasks can range from flagging outliers in a dataset to transcribing an audio tape and everything in between. Basically, computers operate based on a set of defined rules. Any task that must be performed by computers must be able to be articulated as a set of basic rules to follow. Deductive rules are those defined in a step-by-step process followed by the computer until the task is completed. An example of this applied to automated legal work is the use of automated document assembly, such as creating a template for a will or other standard legal document. In just seconds, a document assembly application can extract relevant information about a client and use it to create a personalized document. Similarly, a computer could provide a list of cases from a particular court citing a particular law. In addition to these tasks whose processes can be modeled explicitly, other tasks can be accomplished using data-driven rules. The relationship between a set of input variables and the resulting outputs can be estimated by a process called "supervised machine learning", so called because the estimation is limited by the training data set. For example, a team of researchers was able to develop a model to predict the behavior of the Supreme Court, based solely on data from past decisions. They were able to achieve a prediction accuracy of 70.2% for case outcomes and a prediction accuracy of 71.9% for court votes. Although these predictions cannot be expressed based on a combination of deductive rules as in the previous examples, with sufficient input data a relatively consistent pattern can be recognized. Likewise, exam softwareAutomated document processing has been developed and proven to be effective in determining the relevance of documents based on entering a "seed set" of documents designated as relevant or not. In addition to potentially replacing or improving the efficiency of common legal tasks, predictive algorithms like these have possible applications in the legal field as a whole. For example, the results of a race-neutral sentence prediction algorithm could be compared to actual sentences to determine the influence of human biases in such processes. Overall, the success of data-driven algorithms is important primarily to the extent that they highlight the routine nature of certain tasks that would otherwise be considered more sophisticated and complex. Technology adoption in the legal environment will be influenced by the market in addition to the quality and capabilities of available technologies. Historically, the demand for technology in law firms has been low for several reasons. The billable hours system economically encouraged inefficiency, while the typical partnership structure meant that funds for new technologies would come directly from the partners' pockets, unlike a traditional corporate structure in which money would come from shareholders. Regarding the first point, in recent years there has been a notable shift in the supply of lawyers relative to the demand for legal labor. This leads to increasing pressure to improve efficiency and reduce costs for customers. Additionally, an increase in the share of legal work done by a company's in-house legal department versus that done by external law firms makes it possible to purchase these technologies with company funds, which is more favorable. In addition to the growing demand for legal technologies, the capabilities of these technologies are also growing rapidly. The theory of disruptive innovation explains how this will also contribute to the increasing prevalence of legal technology. When the only legal tasks that could be automated were clerical and other low-level services, law firms were willing to adopt such software to improve efficiency and better serve their clients. However, developers have since been able to expand their technologies to handle more complex tasks, and businesses are now virtually forced to adopt them as customer pressure increases. This phenomenon, in addition to growing market interest, will lead to rapid adoption of technology in the legal field. As the use of technology in the legal profession grows, the impact of artificial intelligence on the demand for legal workforce in certain areas has been felt. or will be relatively significant, while in others it is unlikely to pose a significant threat. The distinction between tasks that can easily be automated and those that cannot lies in the extent to which their underlying structures can be defined. For example, although document drafting can be successfully automated as noted above, more complex legal drafting characterizing the state of the law or its application to particular factual circumstances presents a much more difficult situation. The conceptual creativity and flexibility demanded by this type of writing cannot be defined by either deductive or data-driven rules. Another example is the distinction between examining documents whenpreliminary investigation and review of documents during due diligence. While the former can be automated through the use of explicit rules, the latter requires critical judgments that a computer cannot make. A skilled lawyer can note, for example, any unexpected information or violations of appropriate rules that a computer would not be able to recognize without being explicitly prepared to look for such things. Some advanced applications of artificial intelligence to the legal profession have found ways to expand their reach despite these limitations. For example, IBM's Debater System is capable of analyzing documents and other elements first annotated by humans. While this is clearly less efficient than purely automated processes, as it requires time on the part of an associate, it alleviates some of the major issues with automated lawyers; Any glaring contradictions or relevant subtleties can be highlighted before the materials are analyzed by the software. Another way to use artificial intelligence to perform tasks that a lawyer is qualified to do is to use online systems to resolve minor disputes ranging from parking violations to e-commerce complaints. These technologies help lawyers negotiate by analyzing the overlap between the stated preferences of both parties and can usually reach a mutual solution without any intervention from a lawyer. Although such systems could thus replace lawyers and judges in their own right, they are likely to have little impact on the overall demand for legal labor since it would probably not be feasible , economically or otherwise, to hire a lawyer and litigate. In this way, the complete automation of legal services does not cost lawyers anything. In fact, a study ranking legal tasks based on automation's employment impact found that only about 4% of attorneys' time was billed for tasks most seriously threatened by artificial intelligence. In summary, although even moderately complex legal tasks have been successfully automated, it is unlikely that the legal profession will find itself obsolete within a decade, as some headlines predict. As new technologies continue to develop and establish themselves in the practice of law, there is a need to find a better way to protect the integrity of the legal system while ensuring consumer protection and access to quality services for all members of the population. When it comes to consumer protection, computers offer the benefit of eliminating human error and standardizing services in some, but certainly not all, cases. For example, online services cannot effectively analyze very complex scenarios, but instead of returning an error message, they often return completed products in a way that places the customer's liability. Although consumer protection concerns are not necessarily more serious with automated legal services, they deserve at least the same attention given to legal services provided by human lawyers. Current professionalism guidelines limit the provision of legal services to those trained and licensed to practice law, and the stated reason is to “protect the public from the consequences of receiving legal services from unqualified persons.” . These regulations are then enforced through disciplinary sanctions imposed by the committees.