Damien Charlotin , The Washington Post; AI won’t replace lawyers. It will create more of them.
"The replacement story often rests on a particular picture of what a lawyer does: reading documents, applying rules and producing text. Since AI can read, apply rules and produce text, the argument goes, lawyers are cooked. That picture is not entirely wrong, but it is the perception engineers have always had of the legal domain: Feed in the facts, apply the rule, return the output. Yet the reason lawyers exist (and command high prices for their services) is that law is shot through with ambiguity. If the rules ran themselves, no one would need us. Every step in the chain — reading, applying, producing — involves choices, some of which are genuinely difficult.
A better way to think about jobs is as bundles of tasks. Some bundles are loose: A job composed of a handful of discrete, repetitive, well-specified tasks can be peeled apart and the tasks automated one by one. Other bundles are tight, because the tasks reinforce one another and cannot be cleanly separated. The key example here is offered by radiologists, long predicted to be facing extinction due to AI. Despite the dire forecasts, their numbers keep growing, and they keep commanding ever-higher salaries.
Legal work is also hard to neatly separate. For instance, doing legal research and evaluating an argument are, for an experienced lawyer, often the same mental activity: A lawyer checks the argument by writing it. Pull those tasks apart, hand the writing to a machine, and verification suddenly becomes a separate, deliberate, expensive act — at least if you want to avoid landing in my database of courts sanctioning parties for filing “hallucinated” material. In fact, an irony is that automating the easy parts of a job often makes the hard parts harder, not easier."
