Legal Tech changes the job of lawyers a lot – but how? If computers are soon able to undertake wide parts of legal consulting then the question impose how long clients will still depend on human lawyers.
Self-driving cars will replace taxi drivers in the future. Even lawyers aren’t immune against the technical changes although they usually think their expertise is indispensable. But the legal market is exposed to significant innovations at the moment, which will cause massive changes at the market.
Besides “conserving” technological modifications, which improve existing, known products, there are so called disruptive innovations. The term was characterized by Clayton M. Christensen in his bestseller “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. The professor for economy at Harvard Business School explains in his book why hardened markets get decamped frequently.
First a much cheaper product by a new provider often opens up a new market. The output of the disruptive innovation grows faster than the needs of the consumer and at the end the conventional market is carried over.
Less conventional work for lawyers
The Encyclopedia Britannica, once brand leader, stopped the printing machines after 244 years, because Wikipedia has become a free alternative. The shoemaker at the corner closed his shop because nearly no one wears expensive custom shoes anymore. The cheaper standard shoe admittedly doesn’t fit perfect but it’s comfortable enough and lasts out most needs. The economist names it commodification. The same or similar will apply to legal consulting products in the future. The access to law will get easier but in consequence lawyers will have less to do.
Richard Susskind wrote 2012 the fundamental work about disruptive trends in the legal market. The professor from Oxfords works out three factors in his book “Tomorrow’s Lawyers”, which will, in his opinion, change the legal consulting market profoundly. Besides the increasing cost pressure, the so called more-for-less-challenge, and the liberalization of legal services, Susskind identifies the information technology as the impelling power of change. Even the British Economist already exclaimed the assault on the “anachronistic inefficient” lawyers.
The future has already started
The functioning within law offices has already changed strongly because of the usage of information technology. Dictaphones with analogue cassettes has been replaced by voice recognition software by now. Books are barely read anymore instead online database is searched for keywords and the computer records precisely hours of labour.
The training of clients is less and less often carried out personal by lawyers. Instead there is e-learning. Hogan Lovells calls the online-advanced education program for clients in antitrust law COMPETE (Competition Electronic Training Experience). Baker % McKenzie even founded an own company for online-training, named “the LawInContext”, who covers units for export control, money laundering and data privacy. The content needs just a few lawyers for maintenance and can be reached from everywhere in the world at any time.
Start-ups are the engine of innovation
Several law offices allow external provider to support them. Leverton developed a cloud-based software with the ability to manage a great number of documents in different languages. The algorithm within the software select the contracts, analyses the content and even learns by repeating the process in various cases. If information is required, no one must read whole contracts anymore, instead the software shows relevant segments and cross references directly in the required language. This saves a lot of time – but in the long term it will cost jobs as well.
Other services can help to make the visit of a lawyer complete unnecessary. SmartLaw started with an idea to individualise contracts and to be able to create legal documents online. Entrepreneurs, landlords and private people receive individualised wills, leasing contracts and warnings. Additional there are hints, if the law changes and the regarding document therefore must be adjusted.
Flightright helps flight guests with the enforcement of recovery in cases of delay. Online users can type in their flight number and the date and they instantly receive an expected compensation amount. Afterwards Flightright can be ordered to address the flight company to enforce the guest’s right. The flight guest does not need to take further care and can just wait for his money. If the Flightright is successful it keeps 25 percent provision. But if the user gets no money back, then the service of Flightright is free. A promise no lawyer can make because of legal reasons.
Modira is a platform for settling arguments. Problems that arise after concluding a contract on the internet can be solved there. The company is an outsourcing of EBay and has recently solved 60 billion arguments all over the world. According to their own statement over 90 percent of the arguments are compound on a technological base without intervention from human mediators. Lawyers aren’t needed generally.
What is RA Dr ROSS saying about this?
With IBM a giant in the technology branch is ready to change the world with the assistance of the supercomputer Watson. Watson is a semantic search engine, who can capture the signification of a question and detect fast relevant passages out of enormous amounts of data. Watson is public known because of his victory in the US-American Quiz show “Jeopardy”. At the moment he is helping, with success, to treat cancer more efficient. He examines the medical file and subsequent scientific studies and further specialised literature. Within a few Minutes the doctor receives a list with treatment suggestions.
A similar scope for lawyers is conceivable. That’s what a Legal-Tech-Start-up thought and has send Watson (under the name of ROSS) to study law metaphorically speaking. The project is supported by the Accelerator of Dentons. Once ROSS has been fed with enormous amount of data about US-American insolvency law, he is now in a private Beta-phase. He answers legal questions in normal language and provides additionally a valuation of correctness and the section of the cited document. In addition to it ROSS informs his users about new relevant jurisdiction.
Software supports not replaces the work of a lawyer
At the yearly conference of ILTACON (International Legal Technology Association) in Las Vegas in October 2015 the question of the Uber-moment had priority, so if and when a system like the taxi app Uber will stir up the legal branch. That sounds more like sensation than analysis but even lawyers are long since in touch with the “new” technology. Mostly it’s about software, which support and don’t replace the work of a lawyer.
This applies also and precisely to programs, which search, catalogue and arrange enormous amount of data very fast. It also applies to systems which create documents with whom standard contracts can be generated. At last there are nothing other than the technological evolution of form books and form contracts which are available everywhere for decades – without anyone conjuring the downfall of lawyer’s work.
But these systems don’t replace the work of a lawyer, but rather the work of lawyers in areas where lawyers aren’t needed anyway.
Lawyer Cyborgs stay dreams of the future
All these software-systems run up against their limits, when it comes to rate information and to give advice, who is based on learnt knowledge, lived experience and intuitive valuation of a situation. If machines can do this sometime in the future, will there be lawyer cyborgs, “Lawyernators” which can give this advice? Who knows but this day would lay so far in the future, that we can just conjecture about it.
Basically the whole topic is not so unusual: It is the principle of the differentiation of labour. The thesis of Susskind about the commoditisation of all services of a lawyer describes the process, who takes place, as soon as you don’t see the work of a lawyer as a complete artwork similar to manufactory anymore. Of course lawyers manage tasks, which only they can do. But also they do things and classify them as work of a lawyer, which aren’t actually lawyer’s tasks. LegalTech is especially strong in this area –and often even better.
Man or machine?
It is normal for us to ask Siri how the weather will be. The forecast is not imposed by a studied meteorologist, who has job experience for many years, but by an algorithm who has been fed with weather data. Naturally we are asking Google and not a local for the fastest way to the best restaurant of the town. In the future people with legal questions will ask ROSS or a relative of which percentage he can lower the rent because the central heating refuses to work again.
Short-dated it’s possible that technological innovation in legal consulting will just replace wherefore you don’t need a lawyer anyway. Long-dated the relevant question could be why a justice seeker should be dependent on conventional service of human lawyers anyway.