The humorist’s dream of a world without lawyers may soon be at hand, at least if a recent New York Times article is to be believed. The article is the latest one to project the fears of many in the information (formerly newspaper) business onto their target du jour. Once again, we are told that technology is replacing people at work but now it is affecting skilled white-collar workers such as layers as well. Bartleby the Scrivener would be shocked.
What is actually happening here is that the worst parts of the legal profession are being automated – those which are the most routine and least thoughful. Not to mention the least fun, I doubt if many aspiring attorneys attended law school because of their desire to read emails for 15 hours a day.
What this technology does is simply free up lawyer’s time by making complexity more manageable, allowing them to work on what they should actually be doing. Only a cultural sadist would be happy to see the number of lawsuits increase, but decreasing the cost of resolving conflicts and increasing the chance of finding the best result may be no bad thing.
A lesson as to how this will play out can be drawn from the revolution in finance as computers became faster and cheaper. There were probably few articles about it at the time but some office analysts no doubt feared for their jobs. What would they do if they couldn’t calculate regressions, correlations, matrix determinants all day?
It turns out that computers are actually very good at chores and math but very bad at knowing why they are doing that math.The result has not been a withering of jobs in the financial industry, but an explosion. As information becomes more readily available, the need for people who are able to analyze it, determine what is relevant and, most importantly, how it can be used profitably grows even more acute.
The millions of calculations in an average financial decisions can be calculated in a few minutes, but knowing which numbers are important, how their relationships should be calculated, and how to interpret the results requires a completely different set of skills. This analysis is the fun part of the job and, not coincidentally, it is something that the human mind is ideally suited for. While IBM’s Watson may have been faster at pulling up relevant facts on Jeopardy, it didn’t know why it should win.
Anyone who goes to searches Yahoo Finance or any other financial site today has access to more data than even the largest investment bank did several decades ago and can manipulate and compare them in infinite ways. But, perhaps because of this, most people will still seek out expert advice when figuring out what portfolio is the best for their circumstances.
In the end, there will be some shifting at firms as they learn how best to redeploy their lower-level lawyers and some jobs will be lost while new ones are created. But the shift isn’t different than the massive changes enacted as copy clerks were replaced by photocopiers and couriers by fax machines. Rather than fearing technology lawyers, and others in the thinking trades, should embrace it as it frees them up to perform the most interesting parts of their jobs. Although they might wish to take some courses in computer logic instead of speed-reading.
