A great lawyer costs you an arm and a leg but not for long. Lawyer 2.0 is coming. In the very near future lawyers will be augmented with artificial intelligence that will help them to radically reduce their costs to provide a stellar service and take on caseloads impossible to deal without an AI.
Why lawyers are so expensive
Do you know why a great lawyer costs you an arm and a leg? The answer is time spent on research and time spent on education.
The journey of a lawyer starts at spending years and years in the law school learning all the common and uncommon edges of the law. Law school teaches lawyers to listen to each client’s problem carefully, craft a custom plan for each and then execute the plan by the tools provided by the legal system. The plans are gathered information with conditions which in turn will cause an action.
All of the above takes much time to do well. In some cases, lawyers can spend up to 50% of their time researching and gathering information. The problem with this model is that it does not scale.
Why lawyer 2.0 will revolutionize the industry
Artificial intelligence is already able to automate many small tasks from contract analysis to workflow automation. The future is already partly here. Right now any lawyer can use AIs to analyze contracts, find irregularities in documents, automate repetitive tasks like creating, negotiating, executing and filing NDAs, and the list goes on. Costs are minimal compared to the time saved.
The service of lawyer 2.0 will start with an intelligent AI-powered chatbot that will find out what the client’s problem is. Then it will find out all the necessary information from the client to see if it can offer a solution based on the information gathered or if there’s a need for a human lawyer.
We are close to having AIs that can converse like humans so for the clients the chatting experience is very satisfying because everything happens in an instant and the conversation feels like talking to a human. If AI does not know what to do next, it can put all the information gathered in a database, summarize the key points and redirect the client to a human lawyer.
A human lawyer will then use individual, specialized AIs to help to serve the client better. Because all the repetitive tasks are automated, everything happens on a time scale that is simply not possible right now. All this will reduce the costs significantly for the client.
Another perspective on the legal profession comes from the client. The rise of the mobile phones, apps and now bots are driving people into a self-service economy. Human service is wanted more often than not only when self-service options have been exhausted. For example, Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human.
All signs point to the direction that the legal profession will be one of the first professions to be disrupted by AI. Smart lawyers will be reading Machian Future and following up closely when new AIs are introduced to the market.
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