Lawyers will be needed in the machine age as much as they are now, the master of the rolls said yesterday — if not more so. But they should not expect to be doing exactly the same things in exactly the same way.
Addressing the Association of Law Teachers’ annual conference at Exeter university yesterday, Sir Geoffrey Vos said clients would no longer value lawyers in the same way as before because they would have their own access to the “previously forbidden land” of laws and legal precedents.
“All that will be available, much of it free of charge, by the use of AI-driven tools,” he explained. Instead, clients would value the guidance and insight of trained lawyers to explain what machines had advised and, perhaps also, decided.
Vos, the second most senior judge in England and Wales, said the one of the many hidden trends in our rapidly changing society was the accelerating complexity of all our lives:
Even the Tik-Tok generation do not find that complexity easy to navigate and understand. Lawyers will still comprise a section of society with a better grasp of the rules and the ways in which those rules operate to affect everyone’s daily lives. The ability to understand, martial and explain complexity in a world of ever more capable machines will be crucial to the survival of the legal community.
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