In his recent article in City-Journal, Northwestern University Law Professor John McGinnis hypothesizes that recent and impressive technological advances will have an increasingly disruptive impact on the legal profession. McGinnis notes that “law schools are in crisis,” “solo practitioners have been hurting for a decade,” “attorney job growth has been flat,” and “the going rate for associates, even at the best firms, has stagnated since 2007.” Though the economic downturn has certainly played a part in the current state of the legal industry, the advances in information technology will be the determining factor in the future. McGinnis predicts that “five key areas of law now face encroachment by this machine intelligence.”
The first, e-discovery, is already well on its way to changing (and limiting) opportunities for some lawyers. Most notably, junior litigation associates used to be profit centers for big firms by spending late nights and weekends on hefty document review projects. With predictive coding, the speed and accuracy of this work is improved and the need for bodies in the office is decreasing.
The second key area is legal research, which as McGinnis notes, has largely “depended on typing in the right specific keywords.” As computer technology improves, machine intelligence will be able to recognize concepts rather than just words with the result being more efficient research limiting lawyers’ “traditionally enjoyed leverage over the laity.”
McGinnis’ third area, legal forms, is already replacing many of the tasks traditionally performed by solo practitioners and small firms: trusts, estates, basic corporate documents, etc. Businesses like Legal Zoom and Kiiac specialize in drafting estate documents and contracts, while “Nevada’s secretary of state has pioneered online registration for small businesses, which can comply with regulations by following the steps of simple computer programs.”
McGinnis also predicts computers may one-day play a stronger role in a fourth traditional lawyer task: drafting briefs and memos in simple litigation. Though McGinnis notes “an experienced lawyer could easily shape a computer generated draft into a more polished product” there’s no denying that “once programs start being useful, they get more effective over time.” Ultimately, computers may be playing the role of entry-level associate in some cases.
Finally, McGinnis hypothesizes that computers will bring “moneyball” to law. The term “moneyball”, made famous by Michael Lewis’ bestselling book about the change in baseball statistics and analytics, generally refers to a method of predicting results based on raw data and statistics. For lawyers, the use of “moneyball” in the law means that computers predict a client’s chance of success in litigation, as opposed to a lawyer’s hunch or gut feeling. To some extent, legal moneyball is already in place. Legal support companies already track numerous statistics about potential jurors and past jury verdicts in forums across the country. The question is, how much progress can be made using legal moneyball?
Right or wrong, McGinnis raises some interesting points about the changing role of computers and technology in the law. In a world where lawyers are constantly competing with each other for the next case and the next deal, perhaps the most successful lawyers will be those that are prepared to compete with and for the best legal technology. Indeed, as MIT’s Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have advised in their recent book Race Against the Machine, “The key to winning the race is not to compete against machines, but to compete with machines.”
You can read the entirety of McGinnis’ article here.
