Ride the Lightning

How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact Lawyers

January 13, 2015

Kenneth Grady authored an interesting post in SeytLines on what artificial intelligence will mean to lawyers. Hat tip to Richard Granat.

The first topic he tackles is the impact of AI on substantive law. As he says,

"We now have software that can write new code or re-code itself. As the software does so, who is responsible for what the software does? We also have software interacting with other software, and doing so in ways that humans can’t follow. That is, we can’t reverse engineer what happened when something goes wrong. Who is responsible when something does go wrong? As we let computers make decisions that humans made, and as the computers can do so not by following programs humans wrote but by developing their own programs, what happens to the concept of causality? How do we handle situations where the computer software resides outside the country where the harm occurred? The list of questions is long and the questions are complicated . . . "

The second category is legal services delivery. Computers will ultimately deliver legal services – sooner rather than later as IBM's Watson enters the legal market. What supervision of the machines will be required by lawyers who use them? Is there a line between lawyers practicing law and computers practicing law? The questions – and ethical ramifications – are many.

The ultimate "existential risk" is a world in which computers destroy the human race (this always brings me back to "Skynet."

No matter what you believe the impact of AI will be, it is troubling that lawyers have largely been absent from the discussions about that impact. I agree with Grady that 2015 should be the year that lawyers get engaged and seek to understand the implications of AI on the legal profession.

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