Artificial Intelligence and the Law: Where Are We Headed?

By Bob Nice, The Nice Law Firm

When I went to law school, we had libraries.  As a young associate, I spent my mornings in the firm’s library and piled up multiple volumes of case law and statutes, either opened to the starting page or filled with post it notes for good quotes. I then spent the afternoon compiling those citations into the brief du jour. That process quickly morphed (a word that technology created) into online research with cut and paste, allowing us to do in minutes what used to take hours.
 
Today, artificial intelligence (AI) has arrived. Some areas of practice are at risk. AI can read thousands of pages of documents per minute. This cannot help but have a dramatic impact on the review and transactional components of a law practice. But, for we litigators, there is hope. In one of the most important statements I’ve read in recent years about the future of the law, the ABA Journal stated (and I’m paraphrasing) that “the internet will drive transactional work to commodity pricing, but there will never be a substitute for representing another human being in court." I’m counting on that statement to be true.

For an interesting perspective on these issues, I recommend a recent Forbes article entitled Artificial Intelligence and the Evolution of the Law.

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