UVAIce wrote:This is a little silly, but it is a reality that with technology the legal field will require fewer lawyers as automation gets better. But that's nothing really new. All the office technology available today has already cut down on the amount of lawyers and support staff required for a law firm to do business. But one of the large barriers to automation in the legal field, like the medical field, is regulation. Oh, and the entire glut of folks out there with a license to practice law doesn't help either.
But I can tell you right now that boiler plate documents burn people, and entire business sectors, on a fairly regular basis. And I've seen some pretty jacked up arrangements created by LegalZoom and the like. But for most people legal costs are just a transaction cost and they will try to get the cheapest rate possible.
This. Transactional practices won't be gone. It's just that efficiencies will reduce the need for leverage. No different from the litigators in that respect.
When I was in big law, I spent a stupid number of hours adapting basic documents to current parties/dates. A fairly low-end AI program could take over a lot of that work by figuring out context clues- essentially a "smart" find and replace. That stuff will eventually become common. However, getting rid of that sort of scut work doesn't obviate the need for deal lawyers at all- it just means you need fewer of them.
