There’s lots of talk about AI and machine learning and how those tools will or will not impact the practice of law.
One school—perhaps buoyed by all the talk and little perceived impact—says it’s all hoopla. That AI won’t affect how lawyers do their job one iota. The other group—the sky is falling group—focuses on the possibility that robots will soon replace lawyers. They believe that machines will ultimately rule the human race. Neither extreme is entirely accurate.
I recently had a chance to hear Richard Susskind speak on AI in law and, as always, found his comments perceptive and spot on. Susskind spoke as part of a series of lectures entitled Legal Tech Essentials 2022. This year, the series was a joint effort between Bucerius Law School’s Center for Legal Technology and Data Science and Singapore Management University’s Centre for Computational Law at the Yong Pung How School of Law.
Susskind noted the evolution from early AI programs that could deliver simple decision trees. Today, Susskind notes that AI programs that can do much more sophisticated work. Says Susskind, this evolution was enabled by the web and the advent and lower costs of brute force computing. Perhaps most significantly, though, the evolution was enabled by the transition from AI programs that had to be pre-programmed to those that could actually learn.
These developments led to an increased ability of AI to make future predictions based on large amounts of data. These AI predictions are often just as accurate, if not more so, than those of humans. And these predictions can be done in a fraction of the time that humans could do them, even if humans could. For lawyers, accessing these