Artificial intelligence is challenging again. Will a large number of highly paid lawyers be replaced this time?

News on April 10th, previous advances in artificial intelligence once led people to predict that the high-paying industry of law will be the most likely to face a huge unemployment rate. increased risk. But in the end, this prediction did not come true. Will this time be different?

The following is the translated content:

More than ten years ago, some people predicted that the profession of lawyers would become an endangered species and that their livelihoods would be threatened by artificial intelligence technology.

But these pessimists are too anxious. While smart software has replaced some of the drudgery of legal work—such as searching, reviewing, and mining reams of legal documents for useful information—employment in the legal industry is growing faster than the U.S. labor market as a whole.

Now, as a new artificial intelligence threat strikes again, lawyers may be feeling a sense of deja vu. Some have warned that software like ChatGPT, with its human-like fluency, could replace much of the legal workforce. While there are some flaws with the new AI, notably its tendency to make things up, including false legal citations, proponents of the unemployment argument insist that these problems are just blips in the emerging technology's growth and can be fixed. solve.

Will the pessimists finally prevail this time?

Law is considered one of the most threatened high-paying professions due to recent advances in artificial intelligence, as lawyers are basically wordsmiths. The new technology can instantly recognize and analyze words and generate text, and it seems that it can already perform the basic work of lawyers.

“It’s really powerful,” said Robert Plotkin, an intellectual property attorney in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Most of my work and career are writing texts."

But according to historical experience, the impact of new technologies is more likely to be a gradual upward trend rather than a sudden scourge.

The new generation of artificial intelligence technology will change the practice of law and some positions will be eliminated, but it is also expected to increase the productivity of lawyers and legal assistants and create new positions. This is just as it has been with the introduction of other technologies that have changed the way work is done, such as personal computers and the Internet.

A new study by researchers from Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University concludes that the industry most affected by the new generation of artificial intelligence is "legal services." Another research report by Goldman Sachs economists estimated that 44% of legal work can be automated. Only office and administrative support jobs had a higher figure, at 46%.

Lawyers are just one profession on the road to the advancement of artificial intelligence. A study by ChatGPT creator OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania found that about 80% of U.S. workers will have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the latest artificial intelligence software.

In the past, the legal industry has been considered a popular target for artificial intelligence automation. In 2011, the New York Times ran a long series of reports on the progress of artificial intelligence (titled "Smarter Than You Think"), one of which was about the possible impact on lawyers' jobs (titled "Expensive Lawyers Will Be Used") Cheaper software alternatives").

However, the progress of artificial intelligence in the legal field is proving to be more cautious. Artificial intelligence mainly identifies, classifies and categorizes words in documents. The tools of this technology are more aids than replacements, and this may be the case in the future.

In 2017, major international law firm Baker McKenzie established a committee to track emerging technologies and develop related strategies. Since then, the company has gradually adopted artificial intelligence software.

Ben Allgrove, partner and chief innovation officer of the company, said: "In fact, artificial intelligence has not disrupted the legal industry."

He believes that large language model technology (the core technology of ChatGPT ) is a major advance. Reading, analyzing, and summarizing are fundamental skills in the legal field, and the technology is as good at these as a smart paralegal, and it will continue to improve.

Allgrove said the impact of technology will force everyone in the legal profession - from paralegals to $1,000-an-hour partners - to improve their skills to stay ahead of the curve. Human jobs will increasingly focus on developing industry expertise, handling complex legal matters, providing strategic guidance and building trusted relationships with clients, he said.

In recent years, technology has eliminated a large number of jobs, not just as simple as robots taking over factories. Personal computers, productivity software, and the Internet have made office work more efficient, displacing many workers.

There are 1.3 million fewer people employed in office and administrative support occupations, including secretaries, clerks, cashiers and office assistants, than in 1990, according to an analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Labor Department predicts that these occupations will lose a further 880,000 jobs by 2031.

"Technology is the driving force, and while the changes are dramatic, they often take a decade or more to materialize," said Michael Wolf, director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' occupational employment forecasting division.

Currently, the Bureau of Statistics forecasts that employment of lawyers and paralegals will continue to grow faster than the labor market as a whole. Wolff closely monitors the emergence of new artificial intelligence software, but said it's too early to assess the technology's long-term impact.

Lawyers are mainly trying out technology and exploring its application effects. In legal practice, data protection and client confidentiality are vital issues. The legal profession once resisted the use of email until rules for handling information were established.

Furthermore, the tendency of software models to confidently make things up is worrying, and while lawyers’ jobs require finding and weighing facts, negligence carries the risk of litigation.

To solve these problems, law firms often use customized software that runs on platforms like ChatGPT and is optimized by legal tech startups like Casetext and Harvey.

Simply upload case documents to the software and ask it to draft interrogatory questions, and the software can generate a list of relevant questions in just minutes, lawyers said.

Bennett Borden, a partner and chief data scientist at DLA Piper, a large corporate law firm, said: "In the areas where it can excel, it performs very well."

To succeed, Borden said Using artificial intelligence requires large amounts of relevant data and detailed and specific questions. And open questions, such as who is the most important evidence or the most credible witness, remain difficult questions for AI.

Lawyers at large corporate law firms are finding that artificial intelligence can save significant time in some jobs, and they see the technology as a tool to make their teams more efficient. In contrast, independent lawyers are more likely to view AI as a partner in practice.

Valdemar L. Washington, an attorney in Flint, Michigan, was selected last fall to test Casetext's CoCounsel software, which leverages the latest ChatGPT technology.

Washington used the software in a lawsuit against the city of Flint, arguing that citizens were overcharged for water, sewer and service bills. He uploaded more than 400 pages of documents, and the software quickly reviewed them and wrote a summary for him that pointed out an important flaw in the defense case.

According to him, the program took only a few minutes to complete several hours of work.

"This is really a revolutionary tool," Washington said.

However, it is still uncertain how much the legal industry will change and when it will happen.

This new type of artificial intelligence challenges the status quo. While greater productivity can save a lot of time, hourly billing remains the dominant business model in the legal industry.

“There are huge opportunities for artificial intelligence in legal services, but the professional culture is very conservative,” said Raj Goyle, a consultant to legal technology companies and a Harvard Law School graduate. "The future is already here, but not as fast as some predicted."

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