E-discovery grows, but lawyers still needed

ly routine work that can be automated to highly paid professions like legal workers and doctors.

That has led to a new round of automation anxiety. Two Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists, Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and a Silicon Valley software entrepreneur, Martin Ford, have written several books among them — including “Race Against the Machine,” “The Second Machine Age,” “The Lights in the Tunnel” and

Rise of the Robots” — warning that rapid technological advances might wreak havoc with the economy. Not so fast. Despite the fears of some of a “jobs-pocalypse,” the economy has stubbornly refused to cooperate with the doomsayers. Last month there were 149 million people employed in the United States, the most in history. And in recent months a growing array of new studies have indicated that the relationship between technological advances and job displacement is more complex and nuanced than pessimists say.

In November, for example, a study prepared by McKinsey & Co. suggested that adding technology to the workplace is more likely to transform, rather than eliminate, jobs. This echoed a growing consensus that it is important to distinguish “task” automation from “job” automation.

MIT labor economist David Autor has written that the challenge for AI designers was embedded in the observation made by the pre-modern-computing era philosopher Michael Polanyi: “We can know more than we can tell.” In other words, there are many human activities that cannot be formally described. It is those aspects of human behavior that computers cannot simulate.

That view is supported by a new study, “Can Robots Be Lawyers?” — a draft of which was posted last week on the Social Science Research Network by Dana Remus, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, and Frank S. Levy, an MIT labor economist. In the study, they explored which aspects of a lawyer’s job could be automated.

The research suggested that, for now, even the most advanced AI technology would at best make only modest inroads into the legal profession.

The researchers noted that many of the tasks that lawyers perform fall well within what Polanyi defifined as human behavior that cannot be easily codifified. “When a task is less structured, as many tasks are,” the researchers wrote, “it will often be impossible to anticipate all possible contingencies.”