Joanna Goodman is a freelance journalist and author. She is The Law Society Gazette’s IT columnist and writes about tech for other publications including The Guardian. Her focus is emerging tech, including artificial intelligence (AI), connected devices and robots. She is a visiting scholar at University of Westminster Law School.
As she is also the author of ones of the very first books on AI in the legal sector, we were fascinated by her views on just how worried lawyers should be when it comes to the impact of these technologies. We sat down with her recently to find out more.
Based on your research and exposure to the market, Joanna, what do you think is the state of play with AI and the law? How near are we to the robot lawyer?
We are unlikely to see a robot lawyer in the near future, although we already have legal chatbots like DoNotPay which help consumers with specific legal problems. The problem is we think Artificial Intelligence can do everything, which it can’t. We don’t have general AI yet. AI can do certain things very well, and better than human beings, but as was said recently, it suffers from underspecification.
At the moment, AI works best in a controlled environment. For example, autonomous cars work well in airports, because there are limited factors; they transport people between the carpark and the terminal – there are not a lot of potential options or unexpected scenarios.
AI is good at tasks; for example, an AI engine makes legal contract analysis scalable – you can give the system an infinite number of contracts, and it will read and review them simultaneously and consistently. It won’t get tired, and it will review everything from the same perspective – unlike multiple lawyers conducting the same review manually, whose opinions may differ.
But the fact that AI is narrow doesn’t mean AI won’t replace lawyers’ jobs because a lot of the work covered by junior lawyers, and many back-office tasks in law firms, are mostly routine. I think intelligent automation will affect the structure of law firms, but maybe not as strongly as some people are saying. People will not be going to a robot instead of a human lawyer for complex legal advice.
But you called your book ‘Robots In Law’?
Ah, the title is a mother-in-law joke! Whatever you think of your mother-in-law, she has a big impact on your most important relationship. So, people working in legal services, not just lawyers in law firms, need to keep half an eye on technology like AI. You don’t need an in-depth understanding; but it’s worth devoting a small percentage of your time, maybe five percent, to finding out what technology is out there and how others are using it, because it might affect your most important relationships – with your stakeholders and your clients.
Ultimately my joke is not that funny – because AI and legal ‘robots’ will threaten certain business models in the end.
Interesting. What is your view on the other main them that we keep hearing about with regards to contracts at the moment, Joanna, blockchain?
I did see a practical legal application of blockchain for bond issuance by Allen & Overy at the Legal Geek meetup last week. Pinsent Masons’ winning entry to the recent Global Legal Hackathon was an interesting blockchain experiment, too. So there are already a few uses, but legal blockchain is still an emerging technology. While the press are very excited about it, it’s not yet all over the legal sector in the way that it is in finance and fintech. A&O’s demonstration, among others, indicates that blockchain’s starting to find a place in legal, but I don’t think it’s going to be universal for a while at least.
If you are interested in the issues Joanna has raised in this piece, you may well find next month’s Think AI For Legal 2018 conference useful.
Chaired by Joanna’s colleague at The Law Society Gazette, Mike Cross, the special one-day event (Thursday, May 3rd) has been architected to answer just these very core questions for legal professionals around the right way to view advanced technology like AI and blockchain (see the full agenda here – and if you like what you see, don’t hesitate to go here to secure your place.
