What will robot lawyers mean for human legal education?

Though the story has been covered throughout the legal blogosphere, a few readers have emailed to request an OTLSS post on BakerHostetler's hotshot new bankruptcy attorney, a robot called “ROSS.”

I know that some specialists dispute the concept of machine intelligence, but this robot was smart enough to land a plum entry-level job in the profession without attending law school or incurring educational debt.

According to the Ross Intelligence, Inc. website: 

"ROSS is an artificially intelligent attorney to help you power through legal research. ROSS improves upon existing alternatives by actually understanding your questions in natural sentences like - "Can a bankrupt company still conduct business?"   ROSS then provides you an instant answer with citations and suggests highly topical readings from a variety of content sources..  . . So what can ROSS do?  [It can] [p]rovide you a highly relevant answer, not 1000s of results, to your question posed in natural language. . . [and] [m]onitor the law for changes that can positively/negatively affect your case.  . ."

The advent of the robot lawyer might not be so delightful for those of the flesh-and-blood variety. ROSS’s skill set overlaps significantly with the job complexes of many junior corporate law firm associates and public sector research attorneys. Lawyers are said to devote, on average, nearly a fifth of their working hours to legal research and law firms spend $9.6 billion on research annually. That is a lot of remunerative work that will potentially be lost to our mechanical colleagues, and it does not even include the impact that predictive coding will have on document review.

Sputnik News has an appropriately sarcastic write-up (along with a very funny illustration of a robot lawyer), entitled "Law School Scam? $200,000 in Student Debt, Replaced by Job-Killing Robot."

"We are not even speaking about a profession that requires the completion of at least seven years of college, followed by an expensive test and an invasive background check, just for the benefit of staring down the barrel of a 15.5 percent unemployment rate and roughly $200,000 in non-dischargeable student debt. . . 

Instead, we are talking about the latest and greatest idea among the old-timers. . .who have already won the legal profession lottery, allowing them to seize an upper-middle class lifestyle after matriculating from law schools referred to as ‘third-tier toilets,’ or attending bastions of prestigious opportunity, like Harvard and Yale. . . 

The world’s first "artificial-intelligence attorney," touted as the newest member of white-shoe law firm BakerHostetler, threatens to spark a job-killing trend in a vocation where career prospects already frighten a terrorized workforce. BakerHostetler says will save time for lawyers who have to master a huge, growing body of legal literature.  The firm does not mention that nearly all of their 900 attorneys are paid for their time on an hourly basis, a pay basis on which BakerHostetler has generously offered to relieve them of."

Will law schools be forthright in acknowledging that the impending automation of a staggering amount of revenue-generating legal work almost certainly means less income and fewer stable jobs for lawyers, thus further devaluing a J.D. degree? Or will they instead peddle a fantasy that tech-savvy young law students, with the proper law school training, will be situated to take lucrative advantage of vast and exciting new opportunities as e-law providers, notwithstanding that few will possess true technical expertise? 

Consider the following quote from Andrew Perlman, the recently-appointed Dean of Suffolk Law School, whose bottom-rung atrocity of a school [1] generated much favorable publicity when it created an "Institute on Law Practice Technology and Innovation," along with a "Legal Technology and Innovation" concentration for its students.

"We want law students to think like entrepreneurs. . . There is tremendous potential for law graduates to fill new niches in the legal industry, such as founding an e-discovery company or creating a software process that makes law firms more efficient and effective. . . . New law-related jobs are emerging in which having a J.D. is a distinct advantage, such as jobs at companies and firms that engage in project management, e-discovery and automated document assembly. . . . We’re trying to give students an edge when seeking these kinds of positions as well as more traditional jobs."

Perlman and fellow high-profile law-tech enthusiast Indiana Univ. Law Prof. William Henderson draw on the work of British law and technology writer Richard Susskind, a champion of IT-based "delawyering" and "alternative sourcing." Indeed, Henderson relies so heavily on Susskind that I wonder whether he is a clunky robot prototype programmed for spouting Susskind, as well as for self-promotion.

Perlman and Henderson tend to depict the likely effect of disruptive or emerging technologies on our profession in suspiciously boosterish terms. They do not emphasize Susskind's more discouraging pronouncements, such as that he does "not see much of a future (beyond 2020) for most small firms." [2] Or that "law firms are likely to recruit young and aspiring lawyers in smaller numbers." [3]

And I certainly have not heard either propose applying Susskindian strategies to the legal academy, for instance by recommending that law schools disaggregate, alternative source, digitize, or robotize components of law professor jobs. [4] I mean, arguably all of law school could be replaced by some cool interactive learning apps, virtual reality simulations, and guided online discussion groups, all accessible from the comfort of home.  

It would be fine if more law students started thinking like entrepreneurs. It would be even better if more law deans stopped behaving like snake oil salesman. The new niches in the legal industry, and many of the old ones too, will be filled by ROSS and its robotic progeny. However, I suspect that it will be some time before we see the introduction of robot law school deans. The niche of getting rich by deceiving vulnerable kids is a distinctly human preserve.

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notes:

[1] The overall 10-month-out employment rate for the graduating class of 2015 showed a minuscule improvement over 2014, despite a reduction in demand for entry-level lawyers, as a result of a significant year-over-year decline in the number of graduates. No improvement at Suffolk though. Rather, Suffolk's 10-month-out bar-required full-time placement rate declined from 46.2% to 43.3%, placing it among the bottom 20% of law schools.

Suffolk's 25th percentile LSAT is a scandalous 145, which is lower than all but 27 schools, and which prompts the unkind thought that its grads might not be bright enough to found e-discovery companies and so forth, even if the words "technology" and "innovation" appear on their law diplomas.

[2] Susskind, Richard (2013-01-10). Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future (p. 57). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

[3]  Susskind at p. 142

[4] For instance, Henderson opposes weakening tenure for law professors, notwithstanding considerations of efficiency, flexibility, and what Susskind refers to as "The More-for-Less Challenge." (Susskind at p. 4-5) (As you may surmise, the "less" part implicitly includes compensation for professionals).

Indeed, during a "Legal Visionary" webinar, the "Most Influential Person in Legal Education" addressed tenure in his typical blustery, obfuscatory, and self-serving  manner:

"So I know that one of the most popular things is ending tenure, and I actually don’t think that’s a good place to start because it’s kind of a take-away mentality that doesn’t put people in a good mood to innovate, and really innovation is what we need. . . . I think the right way to do it is through visionary leadership, getting people excited about the good things that flow from adopting a change initiative and widely publicizing, you know, bright spots or examples of success. I just think we need to do it from a point of view of the possibilities and making the world a better place and making the industry better, rather than kind of take-aways."

Legal Visionaries webinar, "The Disruption and Transformation of Legal Education and Services" (March 2014) at 24:32-24:50, 25:49-26:15 (copious stutters, uhhhhs, and ahhhhs omitted). 

In other words, creative destruction and race-to-the-bottom economics for thee, but not for me.