Ian Lopez, Legaltech News
Scholar and
lecturer Susskind predicts that artificial intelligence in law will take off in
the 2020s.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a divisive term, drawing stark lines between the supporters who think it will augment lawyers and improve their work in years to come, and those who believe it will one day take lawyers out of law’s equation all together.
Among those curious about the technology’s impact on the profession is Richard Susskind, a scholar and lecturer whose work includes “The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services.’” In his view, AI “really takes off” in the 2020s, and until then won’t go mainstream. And while he finds it funny that lawyers think “AI is on the way” for them in the next few years, there are valid reasons to be both optimistic and concerned.
“There are unquestionably opportunities as well as worries there, and a lot depends on whether or not as a lawyer you are inclined to be entrepreneurial and adventurous or you’re inclined to work as you have done,” he explained.
Nevertheless, Susskind said, “It’s a remarkably exciting period to be involved in legal technology because of the emergence of new forms of AI.” Additionally, “AI and other technologies are enabling machines to take on many of the tasks that many used to think required human lawyers and that’s not plateauing. It seems to be happening at quite a rate.”
Legaltech News got in touch with Susskind to pick his brain about current attitudes around AI and where the industry will head in the not too distant future.
Q: “AI” is out there, but isn’t mainstream in law. Why is it taking time to catch on?
“What you’re not hearing is the general counsel of major corporations jumping up and down saying, ‘If lawyers don’t deliver AI to us in the next couple of years, we’re going elsewhere. … Most of the time, the in house lawyers community is very busy and they don’t have the time to immerse themselves in these new possibilities. So there’s just this kind of vague sense, this background noise that AIs going to come to law, but I think they would struggle to articulate what it actually means for them.
“I do worry a little bit over the hype that people talking about robots taking over lawyers and things like that. What we’re seeing is, task by task, more and more tasks will be taken on by machines and done better. There’s no reason the machines should have arms and legs. If you design [an AI system] why would you want it to have arms and legs? People have that human-centric approach to AI. I do worry about people exaggerating what their systems actually do and what’s actually done.
Q: Why do you predict the 2020s to be when AI takes off?
“I think clients are increasingly wanting more legal services at less cost and the way [I] explain this is over the next five years we’re going to see an emphasis on new ways of human beings doing legal work – outsourcing and offshoring and so forth – so basically lower cost labor and lower cost locations with lower operating costs. The dominant way the market is going to respond to the need for lower costs is not by machines over the next five years, it’s mainly going to be by cheaper people. But that will run out of steam. there’s only so much one can gain through that. And the real change, the real disruption, the real innovation will come when low cost service, low cost service sectors, where the paralegal companies frankly are still charging high fees … that’s where the technology is going to come in.”
“I am seeing an interest in technology in all the forums I visit now. It’s certainly on the managing partners agenda where it wasn’t just a few years ago. So those are just a few reasons why I think the 20s is where it’s all going to start warming up.”
Q: Will AI eventually plateau or just keep advancing?
“I don’t think that plateauing is going to happen in the next quarter century. Nothing I’m seeing suggests that. Everything I’m seeing suggests a more vibrant legal technology industry, a more receptive legal profession, an ambitious group of alternative providers and the markets that meet legal services in a far greater quantity at a far lower cost.”
Q: What about allowing machines to make decisions based on emotion?
“As machines become increasingly capable, are there for moral reasons limits you want to impose? So even if a machine could make a better decision about whether to turn a life support system off and it did decide to turn the life support system off, we may think, actually that’s the sort of responsibility we don’t want to give to a machine.”
“In AI terms, you can say that human professions have three capabilities – a cognizant capability to think and solve problems and to reason; the manual capability to physically handle objects, the dexterity; and thirdly they have an emotional capability to detect and express emotions .and there the three big capabilities of human professionals. … We’re seeing machines do more and more of each of them. But the fourth capability of professionals – the moral capability, where professionals take responsibility for what they do they’re driven by senses of right and wrong, and it’s not obvious that machines can have moral capacities in the same way, and so in areas that are very important to us, we might think, ‘Well because a machine doesn’t have the moral capability, that’s the realm of existence that should always be reserved for the human beings.’”
Q: But is it realistic to assume technology would stop there?
“I want the public to be divided. If we don’t have a debate and we don’t put down some rules and put down some of the boundaries now, by default machines will be more widely used. There’s a whole issue emerging on autonomous weaponry, and that’s the same issue – do you really want a machine to make all decisions about ending a human life, or do you want a human being in the loop?”
Q: Coming back to the present: What will get more lawyers comfortable with AI?
“Lawyers in law firms and in house legal departments are far more motivated by threat than opportunity. Until the platform is burning, most law firms aren’t likely to change radically. The successful law firms, I always say: It’s hard to convince a room full of millionaires that they’ve got their business model wrong.”
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