More than a decade ago, lawyers were singled out as an endangered occupational species, with their livelihoods at risk from advances in artificial intelligence.
But the doomsayers came forward. While smart software has taken over some of the hard work of legal work—searching, combing through, and mining mountains of legal documents for useful information—employment in the legal profession has grown faster than the American workforce in its set.
Today, a new AI threat looms, and lawyers may be feeling a bit of déjà vu. There are warnings that ChatGPT-style software, with its human-like linguistic fluency, could take over much of the legal work. The new AI has its flaws, particularly its propensity to make things up, including bogus legal subpoenas. But proponents insist those are early flaws in a fledgling technology — and fixable.
Will the pessimists finally be right?
Law is seen as the lucrative profession that is perhaps most at risk from recent advances in AI because lawyers are essentially word traders. And new technology can recognize and analyze words and generate text in an instant. He seems smart and capable of tasks that are the daily bread of lawyers.
“That’s very, very powerful,” said Robert Plotkin, an intellectual property attorney in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “My work and my career has mainly consisted of writing text.”
But unless the past is no guide, the impact of new technology is more likely to be a steadily rising tide than a sudden tidal wave. New AI technology will change the practice of law and eliminate some jobs, but it also promises to make lawyers and paralegals more productive and create new roles. That’s what happened after the introduction of other work-altering technologies, such as the personal computer and the Internet.
a new studyby researchers from Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University, concluded that the industry most exposed to new AI was “legal services.” Other research report, from economists at Goldman Sachs, estimated that 44 percent of legal work could be automated. Only office work and administrative support jobs, at 46 percent, were higher.
Lawyers are just one occupation on the path of AI progress. A study by researchers at OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and the University of Pennsylvania found that about 80 percent of American workers would have at least 10 percent of their tasks affected by the latest AI software.
The legal profession has been identified as a ripe target for AI automation in the past. In 2011, an article in a longer series in The New York Times on the progress of AI (titled “Smarter Than You Think”) focused on the likely impact on legal work. Its headline: “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software.”
A new generation of chatbots
A brave new world. A new crop of AI-powered chatbots has kicked off a fight to determine if the technology could change the internet economy, turning current powerhouses into past ones and creating the next industry giants. Here are the bots to know:
ChatGPT. ChatGPT, a research lab’s artificial intelligence language model, OpenAI, has been making headlines since November for its ability to answer complex questions, write poetry, generate code, plan vacations, and translate languages. GPT-4, the latest version released in mid-March, can even respond to images (and pass the uniform bar exam).
bing. Two months after ChatGPT’s debut, Microsoft, OpenAI’s main investor and partner, added a similar chatbot, capable of having open text conversations on virtually any topic, to its Bing Internet search engine. But it was the bot’s occasionally inaccurate, misleading, and bizarre responses that garnered much of the attention after its release.
Ernie. Search giant Baidu unveiled China’s first major challenger to ChatGPT in March. Ernie’s debut, short for Enhanced Rendering Through Knowledge Integration, turned out to be a flop after it was revealed that a promised “live” demo of the bot had been recorded.
But the march of AI into law turned out to be more measured. AI identified, ordered and classified mainly words in documents. The tools of technology served more as aids than replacements, and the same could be true this time.
In 2017, Baker McKenzie, a large international law firm, created a committee to track emerging technology and set strategy. Since then, AI software has made steady advances.
“The reality is that AI has not disrupted the legal industry,” said Ben Allgrove, a partner at the firm and chief innovation officer.
The rapid progress in large language models, the technology engine for ChatGPT, is a significant advance, Allgrove said. Reading, analyzing and summarizing, he said, are essential legal skills. “At best, the technology seems like a very smart paralegal and it will get better,” she said.
The impact, Allgrove said, will be to force everyone in the profession, from paralegals to $1,000-an-hour partners, to move up the skill ladder to stay ahead of technology. Humans’ jobs, he said, will increasingly focus on developing industry expertise, exercising judgment in complex legal matters, and offering strategic guidance and building trusted relationships with clients.
Technology has eliminated a huge number of jobs in recent years, and not just robots taking over factories. Personal computers, productivity software, and the Internet have made office work more efficient, replacing many workers.
Clerical and clerical support occupations, including secretaries, clerks, collectors and office assistants, employ 1.3 million fewer workers than in 1990, according to an analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Department of Labor forecasts further declinewith 880,000 fewer jobs in those occupations by 2031.
“Technology is a driver and there are big changes, but they tend to happen gradually over a decade or more,” said Michael Wolf, division chief for occupational employment projections at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The current perspective of the office is that jobs for lawyers and paralegals it will continue to grow faster than the labor market as a whole. Wolf is closely watching the arrival of new artificial intelligence software, but said it was too early for him to assess what the long-term impact of the technology would be.
Most lawyers are putting the technology to the test. Data protection and client confidentiality issues are critical in legal work. The legal profession resisted the use of email until rules for handling information were established.
And the tendency for software models to confidently make stuff up is alarming, and an invitation to malpractice lawsuits, in a profession that depends on finding and weighing facts.
To help address those concerns, law firms often use software that runs on top of something like ChatGPT and is tuned for legal work. Custom software has been developed by legal tech startups like case text and harvey.
Load a case’s documents and ask the software to draft deposition questions, for example, and within minutes it will return a list of pertinent questions, lawyers say.
“For the things it can do well, it does amazingly well,” said Bennett Borden, partner and chief data scientist at for pipera large corporate law firm.
Successful use of AI requires a lot of relevant data and detailed, targeted questions, Borden said. More open questions, such as what is the most important evidence or who are the most credible witnesses, are still a struggle for the AI.
Lawyers at large firms have seen significant time savings for certain jobs and see technology as a tool to make teams of lawyers and paralegals more productive. Freelancers view technology more as a partner in practice.
Valdemar L. Washington, an attorney from Flint, Michigan, was selected last fall to test Casetext’s software, called CoCounsel, which is powered by the latest ChatGPT technology.
Mr. Washington used the software in a lawsuit against the City of Flint alleging that residents were being overcharged for water and sewer rates and service fees. He uploaded more than 400 pages of documents, and the software quickly reviewed them and wrote a summary that pointed him to a major gap in the defense case.
The program did in a few minutes what would have taken several hours, he said.
“It’s a real game changer,” Mr. Washington said.
But it is not known how much the legal profession will change and when.
The new AI is a challenge to the status quo. Higher productivity means fewer billable hours, but hourly billing remains the dominant business model in legal work. AI should increase pressure from corporate clients to pay law firms for work done rather than time spent. But the top corporate legal officers, the clients, are often former partners and associates in large law firms, steeped in the same traditions.
“There is a huge opportunity for AI in legal services, but the professional culture is very conservative,” said Raj Goyle, a consultant to legal technology companies and a graduate of Harvard Law School. “The future is coming, but it won’t be as fast as some predict.”
