The true value of a lawyer is their judgement, analysis ability, and their power of persuasion.<p>To replace that you need a true Strong AI. So I expect lawyers to be replace shortly after everyone else is replaced. Give or take a few years, since lawyers have some protectionist options, like banning AI from being a lawyer.<p>Weak AI will eat around the edges. Better spelling, grammar, and cite checking software could reduce a lot of billable time. But most associates spend less than 10% of their time doing that.<p>For big litigation, document review has been mostly outsourced to legal service companies. I&#x27;ve been a junior associate (the ones traditionally responsible for reviewing documents) for about 2 year. I think I&#x27;ve billed  ~200 hours to that (out ~4,200 hours I&#x27;ve billed total). Client won&#x27;t pay our rates. So we hire contractors for 25 dollars an hour. There is still room for disruption. Predictive coding will probably become the norm within 15 years. But it&#x27;s only going to put the temp &quot;doc reviewers&quot; out of job.<p>Westlaw and Lexis already summarize cases, index them. ALJ and Mathew Bender sells practice guides. Firms subscribe to proofreading, document processing, and printing services. They hire paralegals and assistants to do the less taxing work.<p>It&#x27;s also important to note that business model of firms only relies on associates billing hours because it&#x27;s convenient. Clients don&#x27;t pay 500 an hour for an associate to make sure commas are correct because it costs that much to provide. It&#x27;s just an add on service to get the high level talent&#x27;s analysis and judgement. Nickle and diming essentially. Associate costs are fairly small portion of current billing rates.<p>Most of the grunt work I do is bespoke. Stuff like comparing one patent to another. We have google patent and questal to search. But it takes a human to do the analysis. Even humans of average intelligence with an engineering degree aren&#x27;t very good at it. If you can build an AI that does it for any patent you feed in, all of our jobs are fucked.