The Atlanta Lawyer December/January 2020 | Page 21

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THE PROFESSION
our self-image. As lawyers, we take pride
in our profession and the sophisticated
system around it, our education, our ethics,
and the promise to serve the community.
A robot that takes on this noble task and
responsibility? Unthinkable! Nevertheless,
many believe that our “professionalism”
is, in fact, protectionism, serving only the
lawyers themselves. Public interest, so the
critics say, demanded that legal services
be more accessible and affordable. 1 “Self-
help tools like TurboTax in accounting and
LegalZoom in legal assistance providing
simple, standardized forms may mean
that there will be fewer lawyers in that
area,” admits Charlotte Alexander,
Associate Professor of Law and Analytics
at the Institute for Insight at Georgia
State University’s Robinson College of
Business. Therefore, “rote, repetitive work
is ‘low-hanging fruit’ for automation,”
says Alexander. “Also, prediction tools are
getting more and more reliable and are being
used to make intake decisions, i.e., whether
to offer services,” says Alexander. From a
perspective of the legal system as a whole,
automation lowered the cost for clients,
claims the professor. David Schulman,
shareholder at Greenberg Traurig, LLP,
saw a change in his legal practice: “I used to
help a lot of clients set up their companies
and businesses. Now, for simple corporate
formations, I send them directly to the
Secretary of State’s website.” This trend
can also be seen in the corporate world.
As in-house lawyers are measured to bring
down budgets, organizations did not have
lawyers draft vendor agreements or NDAs
anymore, but rather took advantage of
“self-service” tools to produce the required
contract, flanked by proper insurance,
says Mo Ivory, Attorney and Professor of
Law at Georgia State University College
of Law. “Clients are smarter and ask more
questions about what lawyers do.” Instead
of attorneys drafting and reviewing forms,
templates were used, says Ivory.
Synthetic Intelligence
Intelligence
vs.
Biological
But, of course, the “online lawyer” is
subject to limitations. “Creating template
agreements is possible whether for a record
deal or an event lease, but might not be
applicable for defining the terms for a
venue with specific circumstances,” says
Ivory. Lawyers would always be needed in
complex negotiations where high sums were
at stake, emphasizes the professor. “There
really is no template for a $50 million deal
or even a $500K deal with unusual terms.”
For example, the terms of an IP indemnity
clause: “Should it apply to all claims of
infringement or misappropriation of
intellectual property, or just to patents and
copyrights registered in the US?” describes
Schulman a common issue. To solve it, he
must inquire: Are there bad actors on the
other side? Any hidden interests? And so
on. Working on the edge of technology
required “drafting language from scratch,
because most issues are new, for example,
in video games and e-sports transactions,”
says the IP lawyer. Tailored transactions
often include a multitude of items that need
to be identified and evaluated before an
agreement can be made. Although he says
an application for risk-assessment would
be desirable, Schulman does not expect
such an application to appear in the market
soon. He believes that due diligence escapes
raw computation. “Clients want lawyers to
make judgments.” The best applications
could not understand the overall strategy,
says Schulman.
Mimicking creative and cognitive functions
is still a challenge for today’s machine
learning applications. First, computers can
only self-learn from patterns when fed high
volumes of data sets. Second, computers can
only predict (and make decisions) based on
finite, i.e., narrow and straightforward rules
that do not require judgment. “Everything
that is judgment-based cannot be replaced,”
says Alexander. This “hidden complexity”
and the need for context-based judgment
will “keep lawyers in the game,” agrees
Alexander. “It is important to think outside
a matrix,” she emphasizes - not doing so
could harm clients. For example, a website
that generates wills based on a standardized
questionnaire might not consider an
individual’s unique tax or family situation.
“People make big decisions. It is dangerous
to reduce a possibly multi-layered legal
problem to checklists,” says Alexander.
“Lawyers are more than the tasks that can
be automated - they are advisors, strategic
thinkers, and problem solvers.”
Similarly, David Schulman points out that
while computational power is a tool for
decision-making and problem-solving,
lawyers guide their clients through a
process that is deeply rooted in a social
contract. “The law defines the rules by
which we function in society,” says David
Schulman. “Consequently, the role of the
lawyer is fundamentally human.” In other
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