When walking in Brooklyn the other day I passed a tall, blond woman in her twenties, crying into her smartphone, who said to her connection, “I was always so happy until I went to law school.” I mean, if the lawyers are crying, what hope is there for the rest of us?
AI may or may not be the end of humanity, but a new report by Jomati Consultants, “Civilisation 2030: The Near Future for Law Firms,” predicts it will greatly disrupt law firms. From Legal Futures:
“The report’s focus on the future of work contained the most disturbing findings for lawyers. Its main proposition is that AI is already close in 2014. ‘It is no longer unrealistic to consider that workplace robots and their AI processing systems could reach the point of general production by 2030… after long incubation and experimentation, technology can suddenly race ahead at astonishing speed.’
By this time, ‘bots’ could be doing ‘low-level knowledge economy work’ and soon much more. ‘Eventually each bot would be able to do the work of a dozen low-level associates. They would not get tired. They would not seek advancement. They would not ask for pay rises. Process legal work would rapidly descend in cost.”
The human part of lawyering would shrink. ‘To sustain margins a law firm would have to show added value elsewhere, such as in high-level advisory work, effectively using the AI as a production tool that enabled them to retain the loyalty and major work of clients…
‘Clients would instead greatly value the human input of the firm’s top partners, especially those that could empathise with the client’s needs and show real understanding and human insight into their problems.’
Jomati pointed out that the managing partners of 2030 are in their 30s today and will embrace the advantages of AI. Alternative business structures (ABSs) in particular will be receptive, it predicted, ‘as it will greatly suit the type of matters they handle.’
It continued: ‘With their external investors able to provide significant capital, they will invest in the latest AI when it becomes available and use it to rapidly increase the volume of matters. This increased efficiency will not harm their model, but rather make the shareholders in their narrow equity model extremely wealthy.’
For associate lawyers, the rise of AI will be a disaster: ‘The number of associates that firms need to hire will be greatly reduced, at least if the intention is to use junior lawyers for billable work rather than primarily to educate and train them ready to become business winners.'”