What Do Technology and Lawyers Have in Common?

Technological advances are taking over and helping out in many spheres of life. The legal profession is no exception. Law firms are adopting legal software, CRM tools, and other technological solutions that help them be more efficient and take some responsibilities off our fragile human shoulders.

Clients are not lagging behind either. They are turning to virtual assistants and self-help websites like lawcator.org for general knowledge and help with common cases. Technology has become an integral part of the legal profession, and here is how.

Automation

Research from McKinsey shows that “23% of lawyers’ work can be automated”. Artificial intelligence technology can already scan documents and streamline communications. If 23% of lawyers’ work can be covered by technology that exists now, imagine how far technology can go in a few years. As time goes by, more and more work will be outsourced to technology.

We’re already seeing the effects of automation in action. The work that you would do as a first-year associate in a law firm 10 years ago is now outsourced entirely to technology. A big chunk of documentation management is handled by software. As a result of this change, law firms are able to focus more on business, trying to save time and money by taking advantage of technology that’s available to us.

Information repository

The times of going to the library and looking up information in encyclopedias are gone. We’ve gone from owning books to storing files on our computers. That turned into massive online repositories of information. At the moment, if you have a mobile device and an internet connection, you can find the answer to almost any legal question. The catch is, the answer will be quite general and not specific to your case.

If you need to handle a fairly peculiar case with many nuances, you still have to hire a human being to be your lawyer. However, human lawyers are expensive and not every legal case is that complicated after all. Some can be solved with some basic knowledge of common laws and statutes that can be found on the internet.

That’s why people turn to websites like lawcator. It’s a free database of US laws that is accessible from any device. One thing technology can hold over human lawyers is that people cannot store that much information in their brains. They need time to do their research, refresh their memory, and offer a solution. It only takes a few seconds to look something up on the internet.

Will AI replace real attorneys?

You can’t blame people for wondering if their role in the legal field is becoming obsolete. As we move towards a more automated lifestyle, we require people to do fewer tasks. Buе is the technology that is currently helping us going to turn against us and replace humans completely? Right now, this concept seems quite impossible.

Technology is incredibly powerful and helpful with administrative tasks and paperwork. At the moment, it can’t replace a thinking head that belongs to an experienced professional. There is no known way to transfer all the knowledge and experience of one person onto a computer and give it the analytical skills of a human. Even if you could do that, it would require some overseeing from a human, so you can’t quite eliminate the human touch altogether.

For the time being, it appears as though humans in the legal profession are irreplaceable. Down the line, we are looking at better technology. Imagine a solution so efficient that huge teams required to handle important cases will be shrunk down to only a few or even one attorney. Though technology is becoming more human, it might never quite get there!

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes