Could Attorneys Be Replaced by Robots in the Future?

In the not too distant future, will robots be capable of performing the jobs of the vast majority of the readers of this article? A recent study performed by The Boston Consulting Group, “The Shifting Economics of Global Manufacturing: How a Takeoff in Advanced Robotics Will Power the Next Productivity Surge,” predicted that by 2025, the percentage of manufacturing jobs performed in the United States by automated “robots” will increase from the current 10 percent to 25 percent. (A formal report containing the findings is set to be published later this year on BCG’s published portal, www.bcgperspectives.com.) Admittedly, this appears to be a shockingly high percentage; however, if one takes a step back, the prediction seems feasible when considering the dramatic evolution of the manufacturing process over the past few decades. When reaching this conclusion, The Boston Consulting Group specifically identified four areas that will lead this transformation from human workers to robots: transportation equipment, including the automotive sector; computer and electronic products; electrical equipment and appliances; and machinery. The reason for the shift to automated robots is simple—the robots save the companies employing these technologies money. Therefore, it seems plausible that a robot could perform tasks associated with these types of jobs more efficiently, as these sectors traditionally involve repetitive action involving some sort of manual labor. However, the question remains whether software will be advanced enough to allow a robot to perform much more sophisticated tasks involving complex analysis, such as those faced by a practicing attorney.

Before you snicker and simply dismiss the idea that Siri and Watson could replace you at your job, think for a moment about how technology has transformed the world and impacted the legal community within the past 10 years. Technological advances in the past decade now allow us to always be connected and instantly access important documents and data by simply clicking our phone or tablet, no matter where in the world we are located. E-discovery has changed the landscape of litigation and specific rules have been adopted by the overwhelming number of jurisdictions to deal with the preservation and production of electronically stored data. Furthermore, by now most attorneys are familiar with the term “predictive coding,” which refers to software technology that is trained to identify and determine the relevancy of a large number of documents. The algorithms utilized by the computer software during the predictive coding process identify relevant and privileged documents in place of a human document reviewer. While the computer software never gets tired and does not make mistakes, a human attorney is still needed in order to “train” the software to identify the appropriate documents. As a member of a law firm that has utilized predictive coding in a number of complex litigations, involving millions of pages of documents, I can personally attest to the positive results that predictive coding has helped to achieve. The success of predictive coding has demonstrated that members of the legal community, including big and small law firms, must continuously adapt to the changing legal environment while embracing the newest technology.