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What the future holds for legal professionals may be anyone's guess. But for speakers at the  “A Day in the Life of a Futurist Jurist Empowered by Artificial Intelligence: An Ethical Dilemma” Legalweek 2018 session, examining changes that already afoot in the industry can offer some telling clues.

From artificial intelligence to automation and remote work, there here are three most significant predictions from the panel:

Fewer Human Members on Your Review Team

Ralph Losey, principal at Jackson Lewis sees the future as one where e-discovery review teams are more machine than human.

The reason? Advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) that is, for now, just a far off idea: “An algorithm computer, or bot that knows the law, knows every opinion, and not only that, but knows what the relevant information is for a particular dispute,” Losey said.

Still, though such a machine could replace the expertise of a lawyer on a review team, it wouldn't be able to handle e-discovery entirely on its own. “There would be still humans involved, and one of them would be the project manager,” Losey added.

While an AI program that is all-knowing in law seems far off, Losey noted that there are already some inroads being made toward this goal. “Look at what is already happening with traffic tickets … there's a traffic ticket bot that makes appeals, and it's already overturned tens of thousands of traffic tickets.”

A Meshing of Work and Personal Life   

The mixing of work and personal life is one prediction that the session's speakers believe is already coming to fruition. “The separation between work and personal life has really started to blur in the past 10 years, and we think it will be accelerating,” Losey said.

Martin Tully, litigation partner at Akerman, noted that such “blurring” is spurred in no small part by the computer devices attorneys and other professionals carry on them at all times. He asked, “Is there a personal life when [smartphones] stay with you 24/7?”

The geographical and physical boundaries that separate work and personal life are also beginning to break down with the move toward remote work in the legal sphere, a trend that many believe will only become more pronounced in the years to come. Losey, for example, can see a time when attorneys working at a law firm will have “never been in its office.”

AI Will Bring Near-Total Automation to E-Discovery

Shannon Capone Kirk, e-discovery counsel at Ropes & Gray, believes that the e-discovery process “will be greatly approved with less fighting in the future” because of two important potential changes.

The first is the advancement of information governance technology “so that when data is created, it automatically gets sorted into the right buckets” and it is managed by other automated “information controls.” The second, she added, is “improvements in technology-assisted review” that will make it fairly simple and seamless to find all relevant documents within a data set.

Some, however, are skeptical as to whether such changes can come to fruition. Tully, for example, noted that many current technology professionals call such advancements in information governance a “mythical unicorn of auto classification,” believing it is difficult to develop, given “the various amount of data types and sources being created.”

But Losey can see a day where e-discovery happens without attorneys, instead of being done by AI and a team “with special training that knows how to work with the AI to find the relevant information from all parties. And they [find relevant information] equally, because they don't care” about the outcome of the review.