As always a must read from SLAW
Here’s the introduction….
Career prophets have been announcing the demise of the legal profession for decades already. According to some, the traditional lawyer will soon follow the way of telephone operators, bank clerks and travel agents. Recently, the prophecies have taken a new turn. While outsourcing, offshoring, legal Taylorism—all previous threats of course remain, we are now being forewarned about a new source of disruption: “intelligent software” in law. Once again, prophets insist that those who are not already into it are laggards, and by now we should all know what will happen to them.
In this post, I address the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in law in a much lighter way. Law firms and intern positions are not about to disappear overnight, and no move is called for in the coming weeks. I believe that, globally, we have more opportunities than risks and that nobody can be very far behind if we really take stock of where we are. I intend to address the future, the potential impacts of AI, but, being no prophet, I will limit my prognostication to the very short term.
I counted a dozen of posts on SLAW tackling artificial intelligence (AI) and law matters over the last twelve months. It is enough to say that even though most, if not all, of us are not artificial intelligence specialists, we feel the need to debate, to ponder, to reflect on risks accruing from the use of AI in the legal domain but also that we do not want to miss the potential huge benefits of any big technological change. I personally think that we are still at the very beginning of the development of intelligent legal information systems. For sure, there is a lot of noise, and, thinking about it, it is quite normal that start-up ventures overpitch their AI offerings as prime-time ready. AI is everywhere; AI is “in the air”. Some commentators will even suspect or suppose some AI magic when facing any quality engineering. We can see an illustration of this “AI hypothesis” in Artificial Intelligence in Law: The State of the Play 2016:
Read Full Article At http://www.slaw.ca/2017/02/13/the-future-of-law-and-intelligent-technologies-prophecies-technologies-and-opportunities-part-1/
