The National Jurist reports…
A 2017 study by McKinsey Global Institute found that roughly half of all work activities globally have the potential to be automated by technology. A follow-on study (also from McKinsey in 2017) concluded that up to one-third of work activities could be displaced by 2030. What, if any, impacts do these eye-popping findings have on the future on the legal profession, especially for recent law school graduates embarking on their careers?
Recently, it was announced that ROSS, a legal research artificial intelligence platform powered in part by IBM’s Watson technology, was unveiling a new product, EVA, which will not only find applicable cases, but quality check case citations and history. As usual, this latest development has gotten people worried that human lawyers—and, in particular, recent law grads who have traditionally been tasked with legal research—may be on a path to extinction.
Obviously, no one can predict the future with certainty. But if history is any guide, these new technological developments will shift the type of work new lawyers are expected to do, but won’t necessarily eliminate it.
Believe it or not, there was a time in the not too distant past when people did legal research in . . . books. (The horror!) Then, to check whether a case had been overruled or was still good law, one had to cross-reference at a separate series of books called Shepard’s Citations (hence the term “Shepardizing” a case). The process was tedious and required substantial shelf space in law office libraries for the rows and rows of reporters and related reference books.
Along came Lexis in 1980, and Westlaw about a decade later, which revolutionized legal research by computerizing it. Research and case checking assignments that might have taken hours could now be done in a matter of minutes.
But the demand for junior lawyers did not plummet as a result. Instead, as technology made associates more efficient, they were expected to produce more in the same amount of time—more research memos, more briefs, and so on.
