Althouse: Law school applications are in decline because "machine intelligence is beginning to substitute for lawyers..."

March 1, 2015

Law school applications are in decline because "machine intelligence is beginning to substitute for lawyers..."

"... particularly at the low end of the legal profession. Document discovery is moving from human to machines. Legalzoom and similar services are encroaching on the production of simple documents, like many wills and trusts. And once machines get into an area, they dominate over time."

Writes lawprof John O. McGinnis.

26 comments:

Lem Vibe Bandit said...: Legal zooms to the bottom of the deck.; 3/1/15, 6:19 AM
sinz52 said...: That's happening in my current field too: Copyediting.

The Labor Department shows that it's a declining field. Today, many authors think all they need is Microsoft Word's spell checker and grammar checker. And with the advent of self-publishing eBooks, they go right from Microsoft Word to Adobe Acrobat format to Smashwords.

Even commercial publishers are laying off some of their copyeditors.

Does that lead to inferior quality? Yes, but that didn't stop Fifty Shades of Grey from becoming a bestseller.; 3/1/15, 6:21 AM
Tank said...: This started a LONG time ago.

I computerized my secretary into unemployment about ten years ago. Guess I'm next LOL. Luckily I'm about ready to go.; 3/1/15, 6:26 AM
sykes.1 said...: Computers, computerized spread sheets and CAD wreaked havoc among entry level engineers a generation ago. All the grunt jobs that existed when I graduated college are gone. Most draftsmen are gone. Survey parties that once required at least three, and sometime five, surveyors are reduced to one person.

It is not surprising that what amounts to database searches can be computerized. It is likely that the programs will do a better job than junior lawyers without professional experience, and much more quickly and cheaply. The elimination of many lawyers is to be expected, along with the elimination many law schools, or at least a large downsizing of them.

All knowledge-based professions are subject to automation, and a sharp reduction in the number of professionals is coming.

In "Secular Cycles," Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov argue that increasing numbers of elites and competition among them for stagnant or declining resources leads to social instability. A dark moon is rising.; 3/1/15, 7:00 AM
stlcdr said...: Because you need to literally spend a better part of a decade in 'scholastic persuits' so you can earn a crust doing what a computer and a photocopier can do.; 3/1/15, 7:06 AM
FleetUSA said...: Let's look at it from the other end of the spectrum.

LegalZoom allows people who are afraid of lawyers and high costs to have a reasonably decent will at Walmart prices.; 3/1/15, 7:10 AM
rhhardin said...: They hired even music majors as programmers in the early 60s, the idea being we'll teach you.

Now music majors in India get the jobs, I guess.

If you're a programmer as a hobby, though, you're unaffected. Just keep doing what you enjoy.; 3/1/15, 7:16 AM
rhhardin said...: It's not machine intelligence, by the way.

It's just that somebody has found a nice algorithm to cover the field.

It's never intelligence. All machine intelligence projects end that way, with somebody discovering a rule to follow.; 3/1/15, 7:18 AM
Rusty said...: Good.; 3/1/15, 7:19 AM
traditionalguy said...: Law School is a bad career path because people cannot afford lawyers anymore. It's the economic collapse stupid. That gutted the middle class after the temporary boom from a Dot Com Bubble petered out and the arranged substitute of a Real Estate/Mortgage bubble popped. That was all hiding the brutal fact of sending of most of our job producing manufacturing capital investment to China to get rich off its cheap labor.

Another way to put it is why trust a Bush Family member or a Clinton Family member who were our leaders who allowed that to happen to us and just decided at the time that making themselves rich was the smart play.

It's payback time.; 3/1/15, 7:58 AM
Eric the Fruit Bat said...: They only started letting women into law school once it became clear that lawyering would soon enough become a dead-end job.

Progress!!!; 3/1/15, 8:20 AM
Anonymous said...: To say I was surprised at this thread, and Mr. McGinnis' conclusions would be a major understatement.
Machine intelligence is NEVER going to substitute for a trained and experienced professional. Not in the home buying/selling field, much less my former field of commercial real estate law where a prospectus (available to the general public) would need to be written to present to and be approved by - in many cases - the attorney general of whichever state in which you were trying to sell the product I had to quit practicing law some ten years ago because I got cancer. Happily, I no longer have cancer but the treatment for same left me without much energy, and with other physical problems. But I've taught Legal Systems in the United States and Commercial Real Estate Law as an adjunct professor at a "highly regarded" graduate school for which for which folks who wanted to make a career out of development, selling, leasing, buying and environmental matters were truly significant.
Legal Zoom may provide fill-in-the-bank forms, but won't tell or suggest you ask (much less answer) questions such ask: what shape is the property in; does anyone else have an option to purchase the property; what is the nature of the Seller and has the seller taken all steps prerequisite to sell the property (or switch "sell" to "buy"). For that you need experience, a willingness to work long hard hours counseling clients, etc. Moreover, Legal Zoom doesn't have fill-in-the-blank forms for Trusts, nor complex wills or estates and they surely will not prepare you to go to court on a client's behalf. Not even those "little" Trial Courts which most Law schools ignore.; 3/1/15, 8:50 AM
steve uhr said...: On the other hand, technology has vastly increased the amount of discovery produced in complex cases. People used to talk much more on the phone and in person. Now it is emails and texts. Computers don't distinguish the hot docs from the rest very well. Need the eyes of lawyers (making $25 or less per hour).; 3/1/15, 9:36 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: LegalZoom allows people who are afraid of lawyers and high costs to have a reasonably decent will at Walmart prices.

Please, please, stay out of the patent field. They provide a template for filing a provisional patent application. But, we lost most of our grace period with the America Invents Act (you can guess who was pushing it, given its name, and where it was pushing, and if you are cynical enough, you would probably be right). That means that you can more often than not legally recover the matter that was inadvertently undiscosed in the provisional when you file the utility application claiming priority to it. To put it more clearly, if A, B, and C are new and non-obvious, and you disclose A and some of B, but not C in the provisional, and then file a utility application a year later claiming A, B, and C, and you showed your product to prospective customers in the meantime, you are probably out of luck.

I have had to turn Legalzoom provisionals into utility applications a couple times, and it was painful before the AIA. It is probably not worth the effort with a lot of them today, post AIA.

Much of the problem today with patent law (besides clueless judges and Supreme Court Justices) is coming from India. They have a technically literate, English speaking populace which is willing to work for much less than people are here. I have a couple of Indian patent searchers who routinely bug me for patent searching work, and a lot of big companies (illegally) are shipping a lot of patent preparation over there. Filed by their patent attorneys here, but prepared in India.; 3/1/15, 11:14 AM
Beldar said...: Oh, bull. I've practiced 34 years and I've never yet seen an occasion on which any sort of "mechanical intelligence [has begun] to substitute for lawyers."

I see LOTS of people who've gotten themselves into worse trouble than they were already in because they foolishly thought they could practice law effectively using online resources.

But technology is a much greater threat, I assure you, to cab drivers.; 3/1/15, 12:06 PM
Beldar said...: Now, does technology affect the practice of law? Oh yes -- between my laptop and my smartphone, I effectively carry my entire law practice with me everywhere I go. And I've been an early adapter since before I was licensed: I was among the first classes at Texas Law School trained in Westlaw and Lexis in 1977, for example, and to my knowledge after considerable inquiry, I was the first BigLaw lawyer in Houston to have a firm-purchased personal computer (an IBM-XT with dual floppy drives and a 300-baud modem) in 1983. I've been using computer-driven projected graphics in court since the late 1980s. I've practiced in a variety of settings, from a NYC-baed mega-firm with almost a thousand lawyers down to my current solo practice, and I've seen first-hand what real lawyers do with technology every day of my career.

Lawyering is, in many way, vastly more efficient and effective now than when I started practicing. But anyone who thinks a computer can do what I do either doesn't understand computers or doesn't understand what I do, or more likely, both.; 3/1/15, 12:12 PM
David said...: A lot of document discovery is tedious but some of it requires an actively engaged human brain to spot things that at first glance might seem unimportant. At some point a law firm or client is going to be expensively humiliated because the machine failed to flag something crucial, or otherwise missed a case altering fact. Then there will be some backpedaling.

That said, the ability of machines to convert paper into searchable documents is very helpful, as is the ability to rapidly search electronic documents. In some ways this capacity expands discovery. For example, a law firm with a good forensic team could likely find most of Lois Lerner's "destroyed" emails somewhere, possibly with the result of destroying Lerner and her organization instead. I doubt that Congressional committees have anything close to the capacity to do this.

Final consequence: those organizations with big budgets, skill and foresight will prevail in the long run, at least in cases where huge amounts of information must be sifted.; 3/1/15, 12:14 PM
mccullough said...: Beldar,

It's not that there is no need for lawyers. It's that there is no need for more lawyers and that fewer than the existing number of lawyers are needed to do the work. The reason for this is technology. Your anecdotes confirm the trend. We don't need as many farm hands, or assembly line workers either. But we still need some.

If anyone wants to become a lawyer, then good for them. But the government shouldn't give or loan anyone the money to do it. And student loans should be dischargeable in bankruptcy like any other loan.

Then the number of lawyers will roughly match the demand for their services.; 3/1/15, 12:44 PM
David said...: Mccullough, lawyers come in various categories. Pick the proper category and be good at it, and the demand will come to you. The category has to be one that brings value to the client. There will always be plenty of room for that.; 3/1/15, 1:57 PM
Robert Cook said...: In a series of comments where most acknowledge that technology has decimated and is decimating broad swaths of employment, it is confounding to consider that most who have acknowledged this would likely say to those who must seek public assistance, "Get a Job!"; 3/1/15, 4:08 PM
ken in tx said...: I have been in court a few times. What I have learned is that it is more important that your lawyer know the judge and the opposing lawyer than to know the law. That is something a computer program cannot do.; 3/1/15, 4:09 PM
Beldar said...: Oh, I absolutely agree that there's an oversupply of lawyers.

But it's because law schools are graduating too many, not because computers are making lawyers obsolete.; 3/1/15, 5:43 PM
Bruce Hayden said...: I have been in court a few times. What I have learned is that it is more important that your lawyer know the judge and the opposing lawyer than to know the law. That is something a computer program cannot do.

Yes, there is some of that. And, sometimes the judge just likes one side better than another. One case I was involved in a couple decades ago, the plaintiffs included the Caucasian wife of the Japanese president of the US subsidiary of a Japanese company almost completely in order to prejudice the judge. He had apparently fought in the Pacific during WW II in some fairly bloody combat. And, it seems to have worked - he ended up getting slapped down twice by the federal appeals court, after finding for the plaintiff, and then doing so again on remand.

Still, this sort of bias often gets cleaned up on appeal. There are typically more than one judges/justices, and all you have is the record, and a short time during oral arguments.

That said, my pet peeve is that a lot of criminal trial judges seem to give the testimony of law enforcement a lot more credibility that they may deserve. The judges deal with guilty defendants day in and day out, and become cynical very quickly about the stories that defendants tell. So, they logically trust the generic law enforcement witness more than the generic criminal defendant, since some of the former lie sometimes, but the latter routinely do so.; 3/1/15, 5:56 PM
Bruce Hayden said...: But it's because law schools are graduating too many, not because computers are making lawyers obsolete

And, have been for awhile. The problem is that for the last decade or so, a lot of law schools have been seen as cash cows for their universities. Friend of mine, who teaches there, also has a PhD in economics, and he was complaining about this 10-15 years ago. In his university, the law school and the business school supported the rest of the university, including all those "studies" departments where there are invariably more professors than are justified for the enrollment in their classes.; 3/1/15, 6:01 PM
RecChief said...: ha! automation replaces overpriced labor once again.; 3/1/15, 7:38 PM
Paul Ciotti said...: I'm always surprised when I see rankings of IQ by profession that lawyers and journalists are so far down the list. (Physicists usually are at the top).; 3/2/15, 2:57 AM