Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

April 10-previous advances in artificial intelligence have led people to predict that the law, a well-paid industry, is most likely to face the risk of a sharp rise in unemployment. But in the end, this prediction did not come true. Will it be any different this time?

The following is the translation:

More than a decade ago, some people predicted that the profession of lawyers would become an endangered species, and their livelihoods would be threatened by artificial intelligence technology.

But these pessimists are in too much of a hurry. While smart software has replaced some of the drudgery of legal work-such as searching, vetting and digging up useful information in a large number of legal documents-employment in the legal industry is growing faster than the entire US labour market.

Now that a new type of artificial intelligence threat is coming, lawyers may feel like deja vu. Some warn that software similar to ChatGPT, because of its human-like language fluency, could replace most legal work. Although the new artificial intelligence has some shortcomings, especially its tendency to fabricate things, including false legal citations, proponents of the "unemployment theory" insist that these problems are only minor problems in the growth of emerging technologies. Can be solved by repair.

Will the pessimists eventually gain the upper hand this time?

Because of the latest developments in artificial intelligence, the law is considered one of the most threatened high-income industries, because lawyers are basically word craftsmen. The new technology can instantly identify and analyze text and generate text, which seems to be able to perform the basic work of lawyers.

"it's really powerful," said Robert Plotkin, an intellectual property lawyer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "most of my job and career is writing text."

But according to historical experience, the impact of new technologies is more likely to be a rising trend than a sudden scourge.

A new generation of artificial intelligence technology will change legal practice and some jobs will be eliminated, but it is also expected to improve the productivity of lawyers and legal assistants and create new jobs. This is just like what happened after the introduction of other technologies that changed the way we work, such as personal computers and the Internet.

A new study by researchers at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and New York University has concluded that the industry most affected by the new generation of artificial intelligence is legal services. Another study by economists at Goldman Sachs estimates that 44% of legal work can be automated. Only office and administrative support work is higher than this figure, at 46%.

Lawyers are just a profession on the way to artificial intelligence. A study by ChatGPT creator OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania found that about 80 per cent of US workers will have at least 10 per cent of their tasks affected by the latest artificial intelligence software.

In the past, the legal profession has always been regarded as a hot target for artificial intelligence automation. In 2011, the New York Times had a long series of reports on advances in artificial intelligence (entitled "smarter than you think"). One of them is about the possible impact on the work of lawyers (entitled "expensive lawyers will be replaced by cheaper software").

However, the progress of artificial intelligence in the legal field has proved to be more cautious. Artificial intelligence is mainly about identifying, classifying and classifying words in files. The tools of this technology are more of an aid than a substitute, and may be so in the future.

In 2017, Baker McKenzie, a large international law firm, set up a committee to track emerging technologies and develop strategies. Since then, the company has gradually adopted artificial intelligence software.

"in fact, artificial intelligence has not upended the legal profession," said Ben Allgrove, partner and chief innovation officer.

He believes that the rapid development of large language modeling technology, the core technology of ChatGPT, is a major step forward. Reading, analysis and generalization are basic skills in the legal field, and the technology performs as well as a smart paralegal in these areas, and it will continue to improve.

Allgrove says the impact of technology will force everyone in the legal profession-from paralegals to partners at $1000 an hour-to improve their skills to stay ahead. Human work will increasingly focus on developing industry expertise, dealing with complex legal matters, providing strategic guidance and building trustworthy relationships with customers, he said.

In recent years, technology has eliminated a large number of jobs, not just robots taking over factories. Personal computers, productivity software and the Internet have made office work more efficient and replaced many workers.

According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.3 million fewer people are employed in office and administrative support occupations, including secretaries, clerks, cashiers and office assistants than in 1990. The Labor Department predicts that these occupations will lose a further 880000 jobs by 2031.

"Technology is the driving force, and although it changes a lot, it often takes a decade or more to gradually achieve," said Michael Wolf, director of career employment forecasting at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

At present, the Bureau of Statistics forecasts that employment for lawyers and paralegals will continue to grow faster than the labour market as a whole. Wolf keeps a close eye on the emergence of new artificial intelligence software, but he says it is too early to assess the long-term impact of technology.

Lawyers are mainly trying out the technology to explore its application effect. In legal work, data protection and customer confidentiality are crucial issues. The legal industry resisted the use of e-mail until the rules for information processing were established.

In addition, the tendency of software models to make things up confidently is worrying, while the job of a lawyer is to find and weigh facts, and carelessness brings the risk of litigation.

To address these problems, law firms often use customized software that runs on platforms such as ChatGPT and is optimized by legal technology start-ups such as Casetext and Harvey.

Lawyers say the software can generate a list of relevant questions in just a few minutes by uploading the case file to the software and asking it to draft questions.

"it does very well in what it can be good at," said Bennett Borden, a partner and chief data scientist at DLA Piper, a large corporate law firm.

Borden says the successful use of artificial intelligence requires a lot of relevant data and detailed questions. Open-ended questions, such as who is the most important evidence or the most credible witness, is still a problem for artificial intelligence.

Lawyers at large corporate firms have found that artificial intelligence can significantly save time in some jobs, and they see the technology as a tool to improve team efficiency. Independent lawyers, by contrast, prefer to see artificial intelligence as a partner in practice.

Valdemar L. Washington, a lawyer in Flint, Michigan, was chosen last fall to test Casetext's CoCounsel software, which uses the latest ChatGPT technology.

Washington used the software in a lawsuit against the city of Flint, arguing that citizens were overcharged for water, sewage and service charges. He uploaded more than 400 pages of documents, which were quickly reviewed by the software and wrote a summary for him, pointing out an important loophole in the defense plan.

According to him, the program took only a few minutes to complete a few hours of work.

"it's a really revolutionary tool," Washington said.

However, it is uncertain how much change will be made in the legal industry and when it will happen.

This new type of artificial intelligence challenges the status quo. Higher productivity can save a lot of time, but hourly billing is still the mainstream business model in the legal industry.

"there are huge opportunities for artificial intelligence in legal services, but the professional culture is very conservative," said Raj Goyle, a consultant to a law technology company and a graduate of Harvard Law School. "the future is coming, but not as soon as some people predict."

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