Lawyers! Watch Out! Robots may be getting your jobs!

One may wonder how legal practice - as conservative as it is - could ever reconcile with artificial intelligence.  The idea itself may sound counter-intuitive.  

"The Trial Warrior Blog"

When discussing artificial intelligence, reference is often made to coding the rules of logic into software and more recently, to big data as the process of providing machines with data and having them using probability to infer information.   

The practice of law, on the other hand, has always been perceived as a staid profession that entails giving advice on the basis of a concoction of legal expertise and gut, intuition and other soft skills of which machines or robots allegedly lack. 

Would then be possible for technology to partially or totally replace humans in the practice of law? Could machines do the job of lawyers?

Personally, having a background in law, I find the idea groundbreaking.  Coincidentally, I bumped into an article in reference to the firm ‘Robot, Robot & Hwang’.  

Robots or machines may not necessarily substitute lawyers but just for a moment think about even posing the question.  Would you have thought of it ten years ago? 

Amy Wan (‘The Legal Pioneer’) interviewed Tim Hwang, partner at the three-member firm RR&H.  As surprising as it sounds, two of his partners are robots: Apollo Cluster and Daria XR-1029.  

According to Hwang “My long-term goal now is to figure out how to turn Robot, Robot, & Hwang - a joke website about a law firm run mostly by robots - into a real firm, run mostly by robots.”

www.techinsider.io

Regardless as to your personal view on the subject, Hwang (not an actual lawyer) and his mock law firm certainly get your attention.  In his mind, RR&H may not even require input from real lawyers nor may lawyers be involved in the advice process. 

This is a legal startup which, in my opinion, will be facing a great deal of challenges.  

If no lawyers need to be on board, for example, what would be the reaction of the American Bar Association? As it also happens in my home country, the practice of law is conditioned upon admission to the bar of a particular state or other territorial jurisdiction.   

This, not to mention funding and VC support.  

In any case, I’m simply thrilled about the idea that this future legal practice is building.  

Although some colleagues may feel offended by Hwang due to the special traditional attributes of the legal practice, us humans need to think that society will find a way to live with AI with humans in charge instead of sticking to the archaic idea that AI threatens the human race…