By: Shayla Aaron
Paying for technology will soon make us obsolete, and by “us,” I mean lawyers. It is no secret that today’s generation is controlled by technology. Technology has dominated what we buy, how we view things, and most significantly, the way we interact with each other. Technology has done incredible things for our society such as entertainment, aiding the improvement of medicine and tracking criminals. It is safe to say that technology rules the world and arguably, without it, we would be nothing. However, with all the good that technology has done, it is hard to believe that it could soon become the root to all evil. Consumers are already camping outside their local retailers to be one of the first to get their hands on the latest smart phone, tablet, and smart watch. Consumers are spending hundreds to thousands of dollars every year that they don’t have to keep up with the latest gadget on the market. The irony of it all is that the technology we are spending so much money on could soon result in our demise.
Legal analysts anticipate that with the evolution of technology, lawyers at firms will be needed far less, and thus, firms will need far less employees. Analysts anticipate that most lawyers will be replaced by robots with human levels of intelligence as early as the year 2025. At times, firms are challenged with the task of searching through millions of documents for an appearance in court that will take place soon. Such labor can cost a firm millions, to hire attorneys to search through these documents. However, with such advances as e-discovery software , half a million documents can be analyzed in as short as one day, costing a firm $100,000 or less for such technology.
As if recent law graduates did not already have enough to worry about, they are now questioning their future at big firms because of today’s technology. Thanks to technology, legal documents are easily accessible for clients online. Drafting repetitive contracts like residential leases and pre-trial discovery is susceptible to computerization. Clients can pay an attorney as much as $5,000 to compose an estate planning document, a service they can now do themselves for less than $1,000. Just like accountants, who are becoming less valuable now that there are online programs that aid in filing simple tax returns, desk attorneys and clerks are also being replaced by documents and programs online that do the work for them. However, clients are less likely to use DIY programs when it comes to the bigger legal issues.
Although technology has made it easier for attorneys to sift through documents, consequently taking their jobs, humans have one thing technology does not, a soul. A machine is only as useful as the information encrypted in its program. A machine cannot reason or think analytically like a trained lawyer. As a result, litigators, more specifically criminal defense attorneys, will always be needed, and they are not in danger of becoming obsolete. Clients are willing to save money any way they can, but not when the stakes are higher, such as paying millions of dollars in retribution or facing prison time.
The negative consequences clients face when they fail to hire effective counsel outweigh the amount of money they save by doing it themselves. Given the serious advances technology has done for entertainment, medicine, and forensics, it is naive to think it will not eventually affect employment. The legal field does not have to become a dying profession because of technology. I believe that lawyers can either embrace the foreseeable changes by finding ways to use such technological advances to their advantage or live in denial like taxi drivers are about new car services (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/digital-
media/10895711/Taxi-drivers-are-only-angry-at-Uber-because-its-ending-their-gravy-train.html) and risk being left behind. Until machines are trained to think analytically and grow mentally without being programmed to do so, they will always and only be as great as their creator. As of now, there is no foreseeable expectation that litigation attorneys will ever be out of jobs. The writing on the wall is that lawyers need to be more attentive to technology, but not threatened by it.
Shayla Aaron is a Staff Member of the Journal of High Technology Law. She is currently a 2L at Suffolk University Law School with a concentration in Criminal Law. She holds a B.S. in Criminology and Psychology from the University of Florida.
