In a post-AI world, who will be the winners?
Lets talk about lawyers.
Post-AI world is a strange way to describe a world that is just turning the corner on a new innovation, perhaps?
After all, while innovation disrupts, adoption also leads to a new normal?
Is this the “post-internet world”?
For me, the “post-internet world” is one that has fewer use for post offices, letterboxes, calculators, encyclopaedias and long distance dial operators.
In a movie scene where rushing to a phone booth is an important plot element, what you are seeing is an enactment of the “pre-internet world”.
Photo by Yuan Yang on Unsplash
If you were a stenographer or a call operator in that world, you aren’t one today.
But you could be delivering packages or selling real estate. Logistics and air travel are still a thing, and growing.
Innovation touches different kinds of work in different ways. Lets examine this for lawyers.
How will AI affect legal work?
Making some assumptions based on the current trajectory, it could go like this:
Possibility 1: Product and process innovation
AI innovations go to the heart of legal work.
Rule making, implementation and dispute resolution are handled in large measure by trained models, with human intervention at well-defined edge cases.
This would be a world in which law making, interpretation and process has attained a high degree of certainty.
Human beings are only required to intervene or involve themselves in the “hard cases”, and new precedents train up existing models so that edge cases continue to remain unique and small in number.
There are substantial cost and time reductions. Access to justice is easy.
There are fewer lawyers who are highly valued, and both, what they do and how they do their work have changed in very substantial ways.
Possibility 2: Product innovation only
Not very dissimilar to the past 20-30 years.
A leap over Microsoft Word, printers, email and telefax. But a leap that enhances quality of legal work in noticeably ways and affects how legal work is done.
Drafts are generated quickly by AI models, research and review tasks are automated, communication and filings processes are streamlined and automated.
While more people have access to lawyers and the quantity of legal work done is higher, the expectations are increased, costs while spread across a range, with some things becoming more cost efficient (such as drafting documents), expertise is still highly valued in other areas (such as presenting arguments).
Lawyers remain as important as ever and in probably large numbers, why? Because processes remain the same.
Possibility 3: Process innovation only
It is hard to imagine this, but lets try.
This is a world with fewer judges, no oral arguments, detailed written submissions, quick results. But also a world where these submissions require a strong human involvement to succeed.
Lawyers are even more highly valued, expensive and important as a bridge to accessing the law. Once renowned for understanding the mind of a judge, now they understand the intricacies of the language model that decides the case.
Judges have the primary role of ensuring models are trained correctly and in an ethical manner, and to run tests on edge cases.
While justice is not inexpensive, it is accessible and efficient. While lawyers are highly valued, there is a dramatic change in what they do, rather than how they do things.
While we don’t know for sure exactly how things will progress, the future should be a mix of a few or all of these things.
If I were a lawyer today, I would focus more on trying to use AI to enhance my offerings than trying to figure out how to regulate it. Sometimes our base instincts are our worst enemy.
The cost of holding back on innovating on a wide scale is the costs imposed on those who seek access to justice.
This is the strongest moral argument for judges, lawyers and innovators to experiment with the true potential of what AI can deliver.
We can choose to lead, or choose to be led.
Before you go.
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The OpenAI API for Everyone Series is no longer free to read, it has moved to Gumroad. I am really looking forward to writing the second series where we focus on harder problems!
If you enjoyed reading this, you may also like this piece on how AI is affecting screenwriters. Timothy’s blog is interesting if the interaction between work and AI interests you!