Robo-lawyer – the future of legal services?
Listening to the very impressive Professor Richard Susskind speak last Friday about the future of the legal profession (thank you ACC and Corrs Chambers Westgarth), two points in particular stood out to me.
The first was an overarching point: all the professions are experiencing a period of dramatic change, with new business models appearing to disrupt the norm. There are numerous examples in the legal sphere - legal tech start ups, e-discovery businesses, ABSs, “new law” providers of contract lawyers, and (I would argue) litigation funds too. Businesses such as IMF are changing the way disputes are run, and were unheard of (in the UK at least) when I entered the profession back in the early 2000s. But taking the point further - we should also expect the processes of dispute resolution to evolve. To cite one of Susskind’s examples, around 60 million disputes a year are resolved through eBay’s online system. 60 million! It’s an amazing statistic, and the eBay online model is now being copied by the Civil Justice Council for a pilot scheme in England & Wales, starting with disputes up to GBP 25k in value (see here for more details). Perhaps “peer to peer dispute resolution”, largely dispensing with the need for lawyers, will become as popular as peer to peer finance has.
The second was Susskind’s bold prediction that within the next 15 years, many services currently provided by lawyers, at a cost of hundreds of dollars per hour, will become automated thanks to the rise of Artificial Intelligence – at a significant cost saving to the client. In Susskind’s words: “We'll probably stop using the term lawyer – there'll be legal risk managers, legal project managers, legal process analysts and legal knowledge engineers” – and also computers and machines to supplement their work. One obvious example are document reviews, but undoubtedly the changes will spread much further. One business Prof Susskind mentioned is Lex Machina, a data analytics company in California which has developed the capacity to help predict the outcome of Intellectual Property disputes (which are notoriously unpredictable). The particular skill of a funder is assessing the probability of outcomes in complex disputes, and thus the value of a litigation asset. It is intriguing to think a computer might supplement or even replace us in that endeavour…… though I suspect even the most powerful software would struggle to predict the key driver behind many commercial disputes: human emotions.
Using Law and Finance to Empower Change
8 年Remarkable work by IBM. Thanks for sharing Mustafa
CEO & Co-Founder Africa Legal
8 年This was always going to happen in certain sectors and Law firms should look at this for documentation functions. I agree with Richard Newman this will only work where there is no need for human interaction on deals.
Partner at Stephenson Harwood LLP
8 年I saw Susskind speak at the Global Law Summit last year - he is very impressive. Regarding Lex Machina, I think the key issue is the quality of data going in. Law firms are not great at harvesting it and I think this may be the issue that slows the development of predictive tools like that.
Brilliant article Mr. Gayner. Reflected by the changes in the marketing communications' industry. Technology is empowering startups to shift the mindset from brands which 'market to consumers' to those which 'matter to people' (David Jones 2016), through social media and indeed the globalised economy. But I would agree that in our world, big ideas which drive emotion have to come from human endeavour and the beautiful mind. Machines cannot create emotions... yet.