This article spells a doomsday scenario for the legal industry but having worked in a law firm during college I don&#x27;t find that scenario to be very plausible.<p>Some legal work is just rote paperwork and perhaps much of this could be automated but it still requires a person to sign off on it etc. It remains to be seen whether this will just reduce the demand for lawyers. You are effectively just increasing the supply of legal services so while the quantity of services demanded (assuming some arbitrary quantifiable unit) will increase. It is not immediately clear that fewer lawyers will be in demand, I could see AI lowering the cost&#x2F;barrier to entry for people seeking services and therefore more actual lawyers being required.<p>The rest of legal work is not just rote paper work and perhaps cannot be automated in the near future. If one person sues another person, I don&#x27;t see any type of AI being capable of just calculating their way around who the problem and spitting out an answer for who gets what. Such a system that manages to account for every edge case would have to be unimaginably complex. You don&#x27;t hire a lawyer to handle regular repeatable tasks that are well suited for computers, you hire them to handle things when something happens that is out of the ordinary or to consult on circumstances that are specific to you as an individual.<p>Law is also a field where reputation is tremendously important, and reputation isn&#x27;t the type of problem that you can just engineer your way out of. Hundreds of years of tradition are not just going to be upended over night by some kid with a laptop because it isn&#x27;t that sort of problem.<p>A prime target for AI is research. I could have saved a ton of time by scanning a document that gets OCR and then does a bunch of NLP to suggest related primary and secondary sources from a database. The specific algorithms aren&#x27;t really that important but it would be a nice tool to augment the practice not replace it.<p>It&#x27;s also important to note that the legal industry moves at a snails pace compared to the tech industry, people have a tendency to do things the way they&#x27;ve always been done and I don&#x27;t think it is as prime for disruption as people on the outside from the tech industry would like to think. They will have a big impact to be sure but it isn&#x27;t just going to crash like a tidal wave over night and put all these people out of jobs.<p>A further barrier is that all of this stuff still has to be adopted. Law is a very domain specific field that requires a lot of time and study, so is AI. The intersection of people who have experience in both is very slim indeed so the value proposition for lawyers at the top of their field who would be making these decisions is going to be  a hard sell. It&#x27;s going to be even harder when they realize it might decrease their billable hours.<p>tl;dr; AI will augment the legal field, not replace it. This viewpoint comes from my experience working in a law firm with software designed to automate some tasks, not pure speculation like this article seems to provide.