The legal profession is already a beneficiary of AI and machine learning, and it is expected that the future has more in store. Establishing billable hours, due diligence, and legal research are some of the tasks that have been automated successfully, and time shows more can be done. This may eliminate the need for paralegals and legal researchers in a decade, but is it the fate of lawyers too?
When you think of legal education, law school students are among those with the largest amount of information to learn. High pressure and a busy schedule leave little time for students to automate or somehow improve their learning process. law students have the highest number of writing assignments among top professions. Nowadays, they can revert to https://writix.co.uk/law-essay-help to get some help with the intricacies of a complicated court case or an ethical dilemma. Getting high grades on such assignments is essential, so is practical experience. Today AI is often used to practice real trial and court cases as artificial intelligence are self-taught and can now project a variety of human reactions and recreate almost any existing situation. With such technological advancements, no wonder some researchers are wondering whether the next group of graduates won’t be the last one.
Lawyers are Still Relevant
One of the benefits of being a lawyer is knowing that the legal system relies so much on your expertise that you may never be rendered redundant. The tasks making legal services as expensive as they are today are done by paralegals since many are required. Understaffed public legal practices are unable to offer their best since they don’t have enough researchers, so they will greatly benefit from this AI. This means legal services could become cheaper without compromising their quality when legal AI fully kicks in.
It has been shown that interviews are better conducted by robots as interviewees feel less intimidated by them and are consequently likely to be more honest. This is yet another area of practice that may be taken over fully by machines shortly. In all these, lawyers remain untouched since it takes more than algorithms to put together a good defense and argue out a case.
Predictions Regarding the Future
If law firms and public prosecutors make use of tech, then cases will move faster. One of the reasons there is a huge backlog in courts today is the research that needs to be done and indexing that takes way too long to be concluded, and so eliminating these processes makes things move faster. Justice is likely to be dispensed faster. Machines are also likely to make fewer errors than humans, and so there is a cleaner judicial expedition.
AI is likely to be more transformative than dismissive in the legal world. With cognitive computing technology, lawyers will be able to make better predictions on their cases since they will have better algorithms. They will spend less time doing what a computer can do and spend more of their resources and energies doing the creative and critical thinking that machines cannot. This also means lawyers may not have to worry too much about billing fewer hours as clients will still pay top-dollar for quick and effective solutions to their problems. The billable hours a lawyer loses in research they can make up for in quick expeditions. So, we can effectively conclude that tech will only eliminate those that refuse to get on board.
How Legal Education Can Prepare Students for the Future?
Legal students could take lessons from other industries and start preparing for disruption. They will need to learn critical thinking now more than before. The solutions provided by technology will demand that they stay ahead as machines are tireless at spitting information and so future lawyers will need to think just as fast.
The academic angle may need to change too to include algorithms since very few legal professionals understand them. This may need to move upwards to old-school judges to help them gain more trust in technology and to even start relying on it when writing judgments. All this can be done in due time.
Interesting Times Ahead
The times are changing, and the best anyone can do in the course of obtaining a legal education is brace themselves for change. Even college may start looking different when IT students take law as their major.
