Coming soon: Attorney Chatbox?
The way things are going, it was bound to happen: “A quartet of law professors at the University of Minnesota used the popular artificial intelligence chatbot to generate answers to exams in four courses last semester, then graded them blindly alongside actual students’ tests.”
And how did the chatbot do? “If applied across the curriculum, that would still be enough to earn the chatbot a law degree,” Reuters reported on Jan. 26.
ChatGPT is a chatbot program, essentially a software application normally employed to simulate and conduct online conversations. Last December, it was reportedly asked to “draft a brief to the United States Supreme Court on why its decision on same-sex marriage should not be overturned; Explain the concept of personal jurisdiction; Develop a list of deposition questions for the plaintiff in a routine motor vehicle accident; Create a contract for the sale of real estate in Massachusetts — and half a dozen others,” according to a Reuters report on Dec. 9.
The program did reasonably well, able to exhibit a fair bit of analysis, citation of precedents, and (quite gratifyingly, when compared to the appalling written language skills of many law students today) grammatically quite competent.
But the impact of artificial intelligence would be felt soonest and most significantly on routine legal work: government forms (such as a corporation’s reportorial requirements, contract drafting, and simple legal queries).
In 2018, an article on the World Economic Forum (WEF) website (“This AI outperformed 20 corporate lawyers at legal work”) told of how a “group of 20 experienced lawyers” were made “to test their skills and knowledge against [an] AI-powered algorithm.”
“When it came to speed, the AI far surpassed the legal minds, taking just 26 seconds to review all five documents compared to the lawyers’ average speed of 92 minutes.”
The WEF goes on to point out that 23% of a lawyer’s function can now be duplicated by artificial intelligence. However, it is more likely another 25% could be removed from lawyers due to technology as a whole.
Now take the foregoing within the context of a global economy likely headed for a recession. The International Monetary Fund itself reporting that “global growth is projected to fall from an estimated 3.4% in 2022 to 2.9% in 2023.” Ultimately, “the balance of risks remains tilted to the downside.”
In short, the clientele which law firms expect to generate income from are seemingly headed for uncertain waters. And yet, law firms themselves have internal struggles of their own: “According to Thomson Reuters, demand for law services dropped for the second consecutive quarter, contracting by 0.7% in the third quarter, following a growth rate of negative 0.5% in the second quarter. This decline has been driven largely by the decrease in demand for legal services related to mergers and acquisitions, which was 13.7% lower than in the third quarter of 2021.”
Furthermore, “the most concerning factor of the third quarter is that productivity has continued to slide, decreasing 3.8% following two consecutive quarterly declines.” And one big reason for the drop in productivity? That very 2020s malaise: mental health — “In a 2022 mental health survey by the American Bar Association, 74% of lawyers reported that their work environment contributed to mental health issues,” consultancy group RSM said in a Dec. 16 report.
At least from the client’s perspective, they need not worry about an AI’s mental health. Consider, as stated in this column last week, “legal education and law schools [have been transformed by] today’s social media culture into some weird psychosocial daily soap opera where the law students are the lead characters.”
Bottomline: the legal profession — to retain relevance, survive, and thrive — needs to let go of its old model of providing general legal services and instead put emphasis on abilities to tackle more complex legal issues.
For that, it is thus needed urgently for the law profession as a whole to change and adapt as efficiently and quickly as possible. Trash the present insistence on DIE (diversity, inclusivity, and equity) policies. And return ruthlessly to the mindset of rigorous, utterly uncompromising, standards.
For legal education in particular, the direction should not be technical specialization at the law school level but rather one that leads to a profession that is more analytical, capable of melding different disciplines, and adept at identifying opportunities or open strategic possibilities rather than mere solutions.
This means accepting only, and then training, law students of greater capacity for memory and analysis, as well as mental quickness and linguistic skill. Naturally, this in greater probability entails either far far fewer but far far better lawyers.
The other route is to bifurcate the profession, either by competence or expertise (e.g., Britain’s solicitor/barrister model or medicine’s fellow/diplomate stratification).
The better strategy seems to be both: develop better lawyers first, then bifurcate the profession.