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even at the Am Law 100 client level. Clients, even large clients, are becoming cognizant of the fact that large amounts of transactional work are fungible. This forces work to move downstream to firms that can do work that’s “good enough.”

The general opinion is once technology becomes more robust and people feel comfortable with relying on apps and services, people and businesses are going to shift any transactional work they have away from attorneys and over to technology.

http://abovethelaw.com/2015/10/transact ... s#comments

More ATL fear-mongering or is there validity to this article?

It'll be more than 5 years. Ultimately a company is going to need to replace lawyers with technology, botch it, get sued, and then courts decide that the technology was sufficiently functional to qualify as diligent representation. I think we are well over 5 years from that.

There will also always be a market for the top firms to do sophisticated transactions that will never be entrusted to computers. Now a middling firm whose bread and butter transactional practice is standard loans, leases, or even some standard small corporate deals will probably get squeezed out sooner or later. We've already started to see that though it's why it is now less certain that all firms will pay the same and match bonuses down the line as it was a few years ago.

I don't think you'll see computers replacing WLKR or CSM anytime soon.

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.

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.

Yep, it's probably like the impact technology has on any other industry. The every day stuff gets handled by computers with people only working in atypical and specialized situations kinda like how EZ-Pass works for toll bridges. In all likelihood, the more specialized a lawyer is, the less technology should impact their job.

Tech people really overhype how fast technology will be able to replace people because the #1 by far way to get companies to buy your software is to tell them that with it, they will be able to fire XXX people.