One for one replacement is a flaw, but also it doesn't take into account that efficiency often times leads to more work being done.
Like accountants. Excel and other software resolved a ton of their work. You didn't see a collapse in the number accountants. They just crunch more numbers, do more analysis.
uber made taxi's more efficient and I now ride in one 10X as often.
>We're seeing this in the more advanced law firms. What used to take a senior attorney, a few junior attorneys, a large number of paralegals, and a big clerical staff can now be done by one attorney, one paralegal, and a lot of software and databases. The OECD study claims that the risk to people with high levels of education is almost nil. Ask any newly graduated lawyer trying to get a job.
Software has barely put any lawyers out of a job. There have been staff cuts but that is more because babyboomer and older attorneys didn't know to word process. WordPerect (and now Word) are the reason legal secretaries are a dying profession. GenX and Millenial attorneys find it easier to it themselves.
Like accountants, a lot of this increased efficiency just leads to doing more work to make the end product better. You used to have research cases in books. This sounds inefficient, but it's actually not that bad. The book sellers summarize and catalog cases. You look up the issue and see what cases there are, read them and that is that.
Now, it's all done in digital databases. But it's not really faster. The digital databases still require a person to read the case, summarize, and catalog it. But it also allows you to read cases that weren't published. So it's now possible to find better cases, but you gotta spend the time reading it. So instead of spending an hour to get 10 cases sort on point, you have access to every case. But it takes well over an hour to get the perfect case. You get the better case, but you spent more time. Maybe you'd need a team of 50 lawers to find that case in the 1970s, but nobody would actually do that.
Ross--that startup claiming to be an AI lawyer--is spamming legal news with press releases vaguely claiming it can do all of that instantaneously. I sincerely doubt it. There is a reason they don't have a demo on their website.
The only software that I know that is doing what I'd consider legal work is the machine learning applied to document review--called predictive coding. But even that is only a response to the massive amount of information generated in digital offices. Workplaces produce many times more emails and documents than they did 40 years ago. E-discover exploded in the late 90's and early 2000's.
And even that work had already been outsourced to contractors who hired reviewers--often in India--to do the big projects. It's reduced some legal jobs, but only jobs that were created by technology. You can't apply the machine learning to smaller sets of documents since there isn't enough data to learn from.
The reason the legal market crashed in 2008 is because the M&A stopped and because those mortgage backed securities required a ton of legal work. And then the overall recession made companies sensitive to legal bills.
Newly graduated lawyers had a hard time finding a job even when the market for corporate lawyers was hot. Because tons of schools opened up law schools to cash in. They flooded the market with people who had no business being a lawyer. Even in 2005, the median law grad made less money than a programmer.
edit: wow I really ranted here. embarassing. I'm actually putting off doing document review because it's boring. I wish I had an AI that could do it for me.