Relax aspiring lawyers, you’ve got at least five years…
New ChatGPT-level artificial intelligence will profoundly change legal practice in ways it’s still hard to imagine, says top legal futurologist Professor Richard Susskind, but in the short term could prove a damp squib.
In a series of notes released yesterday evening, Susskind states:
“I believe that most of the short-term claims being made about [generative AI’s] impact on lawyers and the courts hugely overstate its likely impact.”
But the flipside to that is rapid change in the future. The law and tech expert, who is an honorary Kings Counsel, adds:
“On the other hand, I think that most of the long-term claims hugely understate its impact. AI will not transform legal and court service within the next two years but it will do so, in my view, in the late 2020s and beyond. There is much to be done in the meantime but the change will be incremental rather than in one big bang.”
Susskind is known for advising the senior judiciary and elite law firms about the impact of technology on the law. He’s something of a pioneer in this field, having done a PhD about AI and the law at the University of Oxford in the 1980s and co-developed the first commercial AI system for lawyers. Since then he has written many books, including the recent Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction To Your Future.
A theme of Susskind’s work is how technological evolution should be thought of not in terms of “swapping machines and lawyers” but rather “in using AI to deliver client outcomes in entirely new ways”.
Another focus is looking at things from the perspective of the client rather than the lawyer. Susskind explains:
“It is interesting that most of the commentary on the impact of AI on the law has focused on what this means for lawyers and judges. In medicine, when there is a new drug or procedure, the discussion does not focus on what this means for doctors. Lawyers and the media would do well to ask more often what generative AI mean for access to justice and for the client community generally.”
Read Professor Richard Susskind’s ‘Six thoughts on AI’ in full below
1. Although ChatGPT is the most remarkable development I have seen in AI in over 40 years, I believe that most of the short-term claims being made about its impact on lawyers and the courts hugely overstate its likely impact. On the other hand, I think that most of the long-term claims hugely understate its impact. AI will not transform legal and court service within the next two years but it will do so, in my view, in the late 2020s and beyond. There is much to be done in the meantime but the change will be incremental rather than in one big bang. There will, I expect, be no single Uber or Amazon or eBay in law. Instead, the transformation will result from a combination of innovations across our system.
2. ChatGPT and generative AI are significant not for what they are today (mightily impressive but sometimes defective) but for what later generations of these systems are likely to become. We are still at the foothills. But the pace of change is accelerating and we can reasonably expect increasingly more capable and accurate systems. In the long run, AI systems will be unfathomably capable and outperform humans in many if not most activities. Whether this is desirable is another issue and is the focus of the current debate on the ethics and regulation of AI.
3. ChatGPT and generative AI are the latest chapter in law of an ongoing story that stretches back as far as 1960. The latest systems do not replace older AI systems (such as expert systems and earlier predictive systems). Nor are they the endgame. The field of AI in law is and will continue to be made up of a cumulative series of techniques, the most recent of which is generative AI. Expect great further advances in the coming years. But expect them to come more quickly than in the past. One of the most interesting breakthroughs for the law will be systems that systematically ask their users questions – to help pin down and actually categorise and classify the problems or issues on which they want guidance.
4. According to Ray Kurzweil (in my view, the most prescient of futurists), the performance of neural networks (the technology that underlies most current AI systems) is doubling every 3.5 months, which will mean a 300,000 fold increase in six years. The enabling technologies are clearly advancing at an accelerating and mind-boggling pace and are attracting huge investment. Which is why I say we should expect great further advances. There is no apparent finishing line.
5. It is interesting that most of the commentary on the impact of AI on the law has focused on what this means for lawyers and judges. In medicine, when there is a new drug or procedure, the discussion does not focus on what this means for doctors. Lawyers and the media would do well to ask more often what generative AI mean for access to justice and for the client community generally.
6. In the long run, the greatest impact of AI on the law will not be in simply automating or replacing tasks currently undertaken by human lawyers. Using a health analogy again, to focus only on task substitution, as economists would call it, is to think that the future of surgery lies exclusively in robotic surgery – automating and replacing human surgical work. But the greater long-term impact in that field is likely to lie in non-invasive therapies and preventative medicine. So too in law, the most exciting possibilities lie not in swapping machines and lawyers but in using AI to deliver client outcomes in entirely new ways – for example, through online dispute resolution rather than physical courts and, more fundamentally, through dispute avoidance rather than dispute resolution.
