Clio reposted this
A new King's College London poll found that one in three UK university students believe AI-driven job losses could happen so quickly that they trigger social unrest. (I'm adding a link to a Guardian article in the comments.) Every major technological shift creates fear, especially for those at the start of their careers, so this anxiety is natural. But what I’m seeing right now in the legal tech space, in law schools, and in law firms, makes me believe there’s more cause for optimism than dread. In the first wave of AI in law, eDiscovery providers automated the manual tasks of reviewing documents to produce in litigation. Manual discovery was a significant source of revenue for litigation firms, and lawyers worried that replacing the hours and revenue with AI software would result in job losses for junior lawyers. The opposite has been true. The legal profession’s first foray into AI has resulted in higher wages, more employment, and higher revenues for law firms (as well as faster service, higher accuracy, and lower prices for clients). Legal work is not a single task that can be automated away, but a chain of tasks. AI may accelerate some links in that chain (such as summarization, research, drafting, or document review) but the final links must remain fundamentally human (judgment, counseling, advocacy, ethics, and accountability). For young lawyers, AI should be considered to be less of a replacement and more as a professional tool. In that sense, it is closer to what calculators became for scientists and mathematicians. Calculators did not remove the need to learn arithmetic, they changed what professionals could do with that foundation. Spreadsheets didn’t replace financial analysts, but supercharged what they could accomplish. The answer, is not to reject AI, but to train the next generation to use it critically, carefully and ethically. Programs like Clio’s Academic Access Program are increasingly important because they help law students engage with legal technology in the context of real workflows. Most importantly, they help law students understand what tasks AI is good for, and which tasks demand human supervision, judgment, and discernment. The legal services industry may be seeing these trends earlier than other labor markets, because law is a heavily text-based profession. But the trends we’re seeing in law (reaching new markets, reducing data entry, supercharging human analysis) will play out across many industries in the years to come. There is no denying the anxiety many students feel right now. (I am sending my son to university in only a few weeks, so this is very personal for me!) But there’s also a huge amount to be excited about, as this generation will have more agency to craft the future than any other. This is a transformative time, and we should be careful to be good stewards of our history, but there’s never been a better time to be a student.